Dog-shifting Librarians

Author Amber Polo enjoys incorporating serious issues, research, and humor into her fiction, and she was my guest on "Crazy Tuesday" (http://www.pwrtalkradio.com/page/r-cherry ) to talk about her Shapeshifters' Library series. The show can be heard "On Demand" for the rest of this year.

I put my foot in it immediately by asking what Amber Polo's extensive experience with doggy Obedience Training brings to her writing about romances between shapeshifters who happen to be part-time dogs. I was hoping that Amber might compare and contrast leash-and-collar wearing, and themes of dominance and submission.

Not so fast. Amber's dogs are closer to The Lady And The Tramp than to anything Dark Castle, and obedience training is more about understanding how dogs think than alpha/beta/top-dog machinations. Moreover, Amber hasn't (or hadn't) heard of the British dog trainer Victoria Stilwell and the series It's Me Or The Dog.... but no matter. The love affairs are all dog-on-dog (or dog-shifter on dog-shifter) so there is nothing to offend any gentle reader. However, Amber Polo offers interesting insights into how an author can build a plausible world where the shape-shifters retain human consciousness (at least in POV), even in dog form.

Once a librarian, Amber opines that dogs and librarians have a great many traits in common. They are smart, resourceful, persistent, and fun, for instance. Her villains, to date, are werewolves whose goal is to ban all anthropomorphic books. The werewolves' career paths are more varied, but still logical choices for bibliophobes.
Their day jobs include banking, demolition, armed forces, and architecture.

Apparently, according to Amber Polo, a librarian's greatest enemy is the person in charge of the purse strings.... funding.

We discussed guidelines for the suspension of disbelief. For instance, if an imaginary location is necessary to the plot, perhaps it can be based on a germ of truth, for example, a real Mississippi island further downstream. Location is important, especially real locations for anchoring the reader, and one of Amber Polo's favorite settings is the Chaco Canyon.

The third novel in the series, "Recovered" features a female greyhound. A couple of print copies are being offered in a GoodReads giveaway to members (membership is free) of Goodreads.com, as long as the members reside in the USA. The draw is Oct 15th. All authors who run giveaways hope very much that readers who enjoy the book will take a few moments to write a review.

All the best,
Rowena

Jacqueline Lichtenberg will be Rowena's guest on Crazy Tuesday internet radio

     The Sime~Gen novels by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah are being turned into a video role-playing game, taking the series off Earth and into space. In this episode of EPIC award winner (Friend of E-Publishing) Rowena Cherry's radio show, Rowena  interviews Jacqueline about this fascinating process, as well as worldbuilding science fiction. Tune in for more about Sime~Gen and the new story-driven game, Ambrov X.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/pwrnetwork/2013/09/10/crazy-tuesday

Shifting Poles and Toilet Water Swirl

There may or may not be a connection. Have you ever googled "direction of swirl in toilet"? (Before you get to the "toilet", Google will offer you the option of the bathtub, instead. But that is beside the point.)

According to Wikipedia "It is a commonly held misconception that when flushed, the water in a toilet bowl swirls one way if the toilet is north of the equator and the other way if south of the equator, due to the Coriolis effect – usually, counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. In reality, the direction that the water takes is much more determined by the direction that the bowl's rim jets are pointed, and it can be made to flush in either direction in either hemisphere by simply redirecting the rim jets during manufacture. On the scale of bathtubs and toilets, the Coriolis effect is too weak to be observed except under laboratory conditions"

Scrupulous attribution in accordance with Wiki's Creative Commons policies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#Swirl_direction

So.... if you have not redirected your rim jets recently, and your waste water swirls in the "wrong" direction, there could be a mega tsunami in your future.

Not out of the toilet! I'm talking about a global disaster. As it probably would be a dis-aster.... not "aster" as in star, more likely as in "slow moving asteroid". On the other hand, our Sun is a star, and it was the cause of the trouble in 2012 (the movie).

http://paranormal.about.com/od/earthchanges/a/pole-shift.htm

• A geological or axial shift in which the Earth's crust literally slips around its molten core - like a loose peel on an orange - altering the positions of land masses with respect to the planet's rotation on its axis. This could happen by a few degrees or by many degrees. Antarctica could wind up at the equator and Miami could be the new North Pole. The effects on our civilization could be devastating.
• A shift of the magnetic poles only. As it is, the Earth's magnetic north (the north that compasses point to) is not exactly the same as the true North Pole. This magnetic pole is not fixed and can move. In fact, scientists are fairly certain that it has shifted by as much as 180 degrees several times in the past. This change may be sudden or it may be gradual, taking place over hundreds or even thousands of years. The effects on life on the planet would probably be minimal, affecting perhaps the migratory or homing instincts of some animals.

See alsohttp://www.netplaces.com/guide-to-2012/earth-changes-and-the-pole-shift/magnetic-versus-physical-pole-shift.htm

Okay. All this reminds me of one of Professor Trelawney's tea leaf reading (Tessomancy) scenes. (As an author of alien romance, I also enjoy fantasy, and science fiction.) Am I going to believe that we are in the slow midst of a magnetic pole shift, if the toilet does not have a good, vigorous swirl in either direction?


http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/plumbing/toilet-swirl-but-no-vortex-265131.html

No. But, if you are excessively prudent, you might enjoy this blog, which suggests where to go househunting in the next nine months.

http://blog.2012pro.com/2012/how-to-survive-polar-shift-at-dec-2012-safe-zones-of-our-planet-%E2%80%93-united-states

Nowhere in the USA is a particularly good spot. Nor is Europe. Which brings me to the science fiction movie 2012, which poetically put mankind back in --or, more properly, on-- Africa.

I just had a thought,  "if tessomancy is tea leaf reading what is toilet bowl reading?" (For the very limited purpose of prognosticating the end of the world as we know it.) Google hasn't thought of answering that, so I guess I can please myself.

Latrinomancy? But, the Romans did not enjoy a view of a vortex.
So perhaps Ajaxomancy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet

"1596: Sir John Harington (born 1561) published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, describing a forerunner to the modern flush toilet installed at his house at Kelston.^[7] The design had a flush valve to let water out of the tank, and a wash-down design to empty the bowl. He installed one for his godmother Elizabeth I of England at Richmond Palace, although she refused to use it because it made too much noise.^{[citation needed]} The Ajax was not taken up on a wide scale in England, but was adopted in France under the name Angrez."

This week, I watched 2012. I watched it as research for a Crazy Tuesday On Saturday radio interview (I am the host) with author Robert P Bennett, about his Blind Traveler mystery series which takes place in 2021 when natural forces have changed the world, the poles have shifted, pressure is building, and earthquakes wreak havoc.... and a blind computer technologist solves murders using his other senses.

No, we did not talk about toilets. We talked about disability; about Chicago as a wonderful holiday destination for a geek or an agricultural pathologist; about turtles; and about shifting pole theory; and also about the things people do that piss off a person in a wheelchair, and how blind men (and women) might get around using GPS and virtual reality.

I was going to scour the bottom of the metaphorical barrel for a pithy last line, but instead, please check out curmudgeonly remarks about teachers who apparently never flush the toilet or wash their hands on "bad Coriolis".  http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html

Gene Doucette Discusses his novel IMMORTAL

This below is a guest post by the author of the novel IMMORTAL that I discussed in my previous post here on January 18, 2011. 

Of course I know he didn't intend to write an Action Romance or any kind of romance.  I understood what he was doing, and I intended to make it clear that he did achieve that objective.  My discussion and dissection of his novel is a writing lesson for those attempting to do something entirely foreign to Doucette's genre.  I believe readers of this blog who love Romance and perhaps are writing Romance will find reading IMMORTAL to be a worthwhile experience simply because it is so far away from the Romance genre.

My personal reading tastes are broader than my readership's, or the intended readership for my professional review column.  In fact, you might say I'm a professional reader.  Nothing that is well written will fail to rivet my attention.  I am a lifelong devotee of fanfiction.  I even love badly written or "Mary Sue" fanfic! 

At the end of his guest post, Doucette asks me a question.  I shall answer.  I highly recommend that you read what he says here carefully. 

--------------GENE DOUCETTE---------------


I’m not certain how to begin a response to a critique that simultaneously describes Immortal as a chore to read and as something that could not be put down.

But I will try.

I’m going to start with the bottommost point, which is that this story should not belong to Adam the immortal narrator, but to Clara, a character that appears in roughly 1/4 of the book.

There are many things I could say about this suggestion, but to begin with the most obvious: it’s not her story, and I’m not interested enough in telling her story to build the novel around her.  What I was interested in—what I am still interested in—is what it might really be like to live through the breadth of human history.  If I wanted to tell that story through the eyes of a twenty-something year old college student, I would have written a different book.

(Read about what kind of book Immortal IS at http://genedoucette.me/immortal )

The description for that hypothetical book would have been “pretty young college student discovers an immortal man, and is pulled into a secret world of intrigue and danger.  And she may be falling in love…” I expect the most common response to the description would be either, A: “oh; another one of those” or B: “is that the new Twilight book??”

This holds no interest for me.

Lichtenberg seemed to want me to write a different kind of book entirely, but this is not a romance, or even a love story.  It’s also not about the moment in the life of a very old man in which he found his One True Love.  It isn’t that the love story was given short shrift, it’s that there is no love story, triangle or otherwise.  There is sex, and there is sexuality, but in this part of the life of my jaded protagonist, he is not coming across a One True anything.  Or, to be more precise, he has come across several One True Loves in his lifetime, but this is not one of those times.

Adam is of course capable of love, and of caring about the people around him.  Despite his age, he is very much human and very much a part of the human race.  That means, like anyone, he has defense mechanisms to protect himself that leave him emotionally closed off much of the time.  He is also not particularly good at talking about his feelings—unreliable narrator—so his actions are sometimes more telling than his words.

(Some words from Adam:
http://genedoucette.me/2010/07/20/immortal-excerpt-adam-explain-himself/
http://genedoucette.me/2010/07/13/immortal-quotes/)


So knowing what this book is not—a romance about a girl helping a sexy but mysterious immortal man—let’s talk about what it is.

As much as is possible I tried to put myself in the position of someone who had actually lived through history.  I used “magical” characters because they made his history more interesting, and because the idea of playing with fantasy tropes and then stripping away all of the magic to see what was left appealed to me.  But at the very core of it is Adam’s voice and his experiences.  I had to make a number of discrete decisions and forced definitive limitations on myself—for instance, writing an action novel in first person is a real pain in the ass—in order to tell the story.  I also had to decide what KIND of person, and personality, would be capable of living that long without dying accidentally or on purpose.

(One of my biggest beefs with the modern “romantic vampire” character is that they all act like twenty year olds.  I think it’s perfectly possible for a person whose personality is stuck somewhere between Act III and Act V of Romeo and Juliet to become a vampire, but I find it incredibly unlikely for them to have survived beyond a couple of decades.  It is not a survivor ethos.)

And so Adam’s personality—which Lichtenberg has lauded—is the result.  A sarcastic, sometimes unpleasant, very clever man who tells the story of his life with a Raymond Chandler-esque bitterness.

(What others have said about Adam: http://genedoucette.me/media/ )

More generally, I find the points about convention and structure to be a bit strange.  Why would I take my unconventionally structured, unconventional story and turn the whole thing around so that it’s about a different character, has none of what makes it compelling—the narrator’s voice—and jam it into a structure that so very many other novels already adhere to?  At some point it stops being THIS novel and becomes someone else’s novel, and we’re about three steps past that.

(My discussion of genres: http://genedoucette.me/2010/10/07/on-genres/ )

“You have a lovely cat,” Lichtenberg seem to be saying, “and he would be even more perfect if he was a horse.”

Some other points:

--Adam’s unlikability.  Lichtenberg comments that I have given myself an uphill battle in attempting to tell a story from the perspective of an unlikable character.  My problem with this is I don’t think Adam’s unlikable.  I never have.  He is complicated, bitter, and drunk through much of the first part of the book, but I don’t believe him to be unlikable.  Yet this is not the only place I have seen this comment, so I don’t know what more to say about it than “all right, but you still liked him enough to keep reading.”

(I discuss his apparent unlikability more in: http://genedoucette.me/2010/10/22/mary-sues-and-assholes/)

--Drinking.  I thought the comment that Adam was unlikable specifically for enabling two college students by buying them alcohol was very telling.  The implication being he’s buying for minors and that they would not have otherwise had access to alcohol.  We are talking about COLLEGE here; this is a preposterous suggestion.  There is also nothing in the text whereby Adam “keeps them drunk”, nor does he ply them with alcohol.  He is not recklessly manipulating mortals into drinking with him; he’s drinking with mortals who are inclined to drink as well.  As he says on multiple occasions, his preference is to hang out with bar drunks and college students.  It’s a social thing.

A larger point would be that, again, this is a man who has lived an incredibly long time.  It is only in the last hundred years or so that alcohol has developed a (deserved, I admit) stigma, and he was drunk for most of them and probably didn’t notice.  In earlier times—one need not go back far at all, actually—drinking regularly and in large quantities was very common.  His interest in drinking is perfectly in keeping with his character.

--Murder.  It was hard to tell whether the “gritty realism” point was a critique or merely a comment, but I thought it worth pointing out that if one establishes a character that began life as an African tribesman sixty thousand years ago, one has to reconcile oneself with the fact that the character is a murderer.  And again, look at the historical record of the human species: the remarkable thing is not that Adam has, can, and will commit murder to protect himself, but that he hold the lives of anyone other than himself to any degree of esteem.  The idea that all life is sacred is a very new concept.

--The third act.  I disagree with the suggestion that the switch from past tense to present tense is jarring and unnecessary.  I think it’s fundamentally necessary if only for the obvious fact that the italicized sections at the beginning of each of the chapters in the rest of the book are all in present tense.  More centrally, I find that the present tense makes the action in the final act much more palpable and direct.  You already know, in every other part of the book, that Adam survives, because he’s telling the story from a safe distance.  In present tense, while Adam is still narrating, some of that safety net is removed.  It was something that began as a logical decision—because of the chapter pieces—that became what I consider a happy secondary result: a more gripping ending.

--Saving the cat.  It should have been obvious to anyone reading the prologue—in which Adam recounts a time, eons ago, when he hunted and killed a large cat—that I’m thumbing my nose at this convention as well.

--Convoluted, expository lumps.  I’m not really sure what to say about these comments.  It’s a story about an immortal man told by an immortal man, with small historical tales nested inside of a larger present-day story arc.  It’s not convoluted; Adam just has a lot to say.

Lichtenberg pointed out that there were things Adam talked about that she didn’t need to know, using the Egypt flashback as an example.  The point of the novel was NOT to solve the overarching mystery of who is after Adam—which is revealed roughly the halfway point anyway—or necessarily even how he escapes.  It is ONE point, but it is not THE point.  THE point is, he’s an immortal man, he has some stories, and he’s sharing those stories.  The Egypt passage was pertinent because it was on the subject of why he has trouble trusting women, and he’d just been put into a situation where he didn’t know if he could trust the woman he was sleeping with.  It was a pertinent story, because it was a developing characteristic of Adam, and Adam IS the story.  (And as a spoiler aside, the discussion of cultures revering men as gods is pertinent to Hellenic Immortal, the second book.)


In conclusion, I’d like to steal one of your points: look at the title.  This book is called Immortal because it is about the immortal man telling the story.  He may be complicated and some readers may not like him, but this is first and foremost a character study of someone who is, in my mind, an anthropomorphic representation of mankind.  (And I mean man- not humankind.)  The book has its digressions and its discursions, it may be messy at times, but it’s a compelling, interesting story that is difficult to put down.

So let me throw this back to Jacqueline Lichtenberg: in our past discussions you have lauded the idea of innovation and finding new ways to tell stories in fiction.  You have been handed a book that ignores very nearly every convention yet manages to be addictively readable, and your response to this is to suggest what I think is a tired, conventional story I couldn’t even imagine WANTING to write.  You clearly enjoyed the read.  Why are you back-tracking?
----------END GENE DOUCETTE'S GUEST POST------------


Why am I "back-tracking?"

Of course, it doesn't seem that way to me. I would never do such a thing.  I am all about the future, not the past.

You executed the "form" you chose for this novel perfectly (the pre-chapter inserts from captivity; the joining of the two plot threads.)

You applied that form expertly to the story you wanted to tell.

My judgment is (and there's a lot of taste involved in this) that the story you wanted to tell doesn't fit the form you chose.  I see an artistic mis-match. The virtuoso performance of the writing art does not hide the major problem - passive hero, hung hero, lack of plot-movement. 

I found the "couldn't put it down" appeal because I'm me, but I'm a very rare type of reader.

I judge that because of the artistic mismatch between form and story, the readership will be more limited than the story deserves.

I feel more people would be drawn to (reread and search for sequels) this character if the form matched the story artistically.

So to solve that problem which many beginning writers have and can't cover up the way you did, (and to demonstrate to writing students some points I've made previously) the writer either changes the form or the story -- or possibly both.

Switching the POV is one way to do that with dispatch and economy, to do it in a way that a commercial writer who is writing for profit (i.e. more than minimum wage) would prefer.  But you can only do that way before you start to write, preferably before you "have the idea for the story."

Yes, of course shifting makes it a different story and changes the genre.  In fact, that's a standard exercise in writing class - change genre by changing pov.

However, the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote.

The "can't put it down" story for me was the story of the young girl utterly caught up in the "affairs of wizards" and falling in love with this Immortal guy.  (title would still apply perfectly from her POV -- that's ALL she can see; that's become her whole life.)

That "become her whole life" effect is the core effect of Romance Genre.

From her point of view it's a Romance.  If you're not a Romance fan, reader or writer, small wonder you don't think that would be interesting, or that the novel would be utterly unique in the anals of commercial fiction.

If I wrote this story about this Immortal guy from that young girl's point of view (and from her POV the other woman is an arch rival and a threat) there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, about the resulting novel that could be described as "tired" or "conventional."  Ask my fans if they'd expect that it would be tired or conventional coming from my hand.

But of course if I wrote the novel, the Immortal guy would have a totally different character. So the novel I want to read is the one you would write from her point of view.

When one writer reads work by another writer, they rewrite it in their heads to be their own.

And the brutal fact is that all readers do that too, sometimes without knowing it.

The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote.  I learned that from Marion Zimmer Bradley who always quoted it from one of her mentors, and I don't recall who (which irks me).

It's no doubt something her mentor learned from someone else.  It's forever true.

Writers don't do the innovating in the storytelling field.  Readers do.

So thank you for giving your readers a glimpse of the inner workings of your mind as you crafted the first book in this budding series, IMMORTAL.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Whither Copyright?

It's November the first, and I am doing NaNoWriMo... therefore, I will be brief here. (And loquacious there.)

Announcement and Plug:

On November 3rd (Tuesday) I will be discussing the finer points of the law regarding intellectual property rights of artists and content creators, fair use, first sale doctrine, musicians and more on my 10.00 am (Eastern Time) radio show on http://internetvoicesradio.com/CrazyTuesday

-->

COPYRIGHT: WHAT'S RIGHT AND WHAT IS NOT RIGHT?

Patrick Ross and Lucinda Dugger of the Copyright Alliance.org will explain why you should be concerned about authors' and artists' rights.

Brenna Lyons, EPIC president; Marci Baun, Publisher Wild Child Publishing, in person and other authors via texting will share common misconceptions and some horror stories about copyright infringement.

Useful urls
http://www.copyrightalliance.org
http://www.copyrightalliance.org/letter


A Preannouncement and another Plug:

Please notice the sidebar. This blog is participating with Heather Massey of The Galaxy Express in a massive, multi-blog promotion of our genre (science fiction romance) on December 6th. So far, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Linnea Sinclair, Margaret L Carter, Susan Kearney, Susan Sizemore, and yours truly have pledged either books or ebooks as prizes for those who visit our blog on 12/06/2009.


No Trick: A Treat For Our Readers (one day late for Halloween)

There's strong demand for accessible, convenient, reader-friendly ways for readers to discover new authors without having to go on a scavenger hunt all over the internet, or to play virtual lucky dip
on the online bookseller sites.

Therefore, with the help of my friends, I have compiled, and Charlotte Boyett-Compo has formatted
two samplers which we are proud to call The Best Of Futuristic, Fantasy and Paranormal Authors. If it's not actually the best it may well be one of the first. And it's free.

 http://www.freado.com/book/4645/The-Best-of-Futuristic,-Fantasy,-and-ParaNormal-Authors-#1

 http://www.freado.com/book/4647/The-Best-of-Futuristic,-Fantasy,-and-ParaNormal-Authors-#2

Authors include: Linnea Sinclair, Jade Lee, Joy Nash, Deborah Macgillivray, Susan Kearney, Susan Grant, Cathy Spangler, Kathleen Nance, Charlee Compo, Rowena Cherry, Dawn Thompson, Nina Bangs, Cindy Spencer Pape, C.L. Wilson, Laurel Bradley... and many more.

For those not familiar with the Book Buzzr site:
Click the link
Wait for the yellow loading bar to do its thing
Scroll over to the far right to "Read Now" (in oxblood red)
Click that (the cover art will shift to the right, there will be a central crease down the middle, the left side will be blank)


Alternatively, you can click on "Read Now" in the yellow bar.
It is not such a good idea to click on the front page of the book "to zoom" as you will get formatting bars in front of your text.


Next, look at your own desktop browser toolbar.
Click on View. Then on Zoom. Then on Zoom In.


You can turn the pages using the video/tape style solid arrow.


Enjoy.
Please feel free to snag the urls and share them (but always in their entirity, please)

Maybe one can trick an ancient, fantasy or futuristic genie back into his or her bottle, but the silicon chips of time may be running out for artists and creators of copyright protected materials.


And a Warning:

I was amused and flattered to receive a Google Alert for my name, pointing me to a download request for one of my paperbacks on a site where members are known to share e-books.

However, I am not so amused to see that a link (on a blue field) has been posted which is only visible for visitors to the site who are NOT members. I'm told that members of the site do not see that link. Therefore, my friends should know that the link is probably malicious or else a fraud.

/request/14460/0/Knight%27s_Fork_by_Rowena_Cherry/?sms_ss=blogger">XXX - Knight's Fork by Rowena Cherry download request

please help,I need this book and others by the same authorWhen the Queen Consort of the Volnoth asks him to father her child, not realizing that he is the son of her greatest enemy and that he has taken ...

Now... I'm going back to NaNoWriMo where I am writing "Devil" Deverill's come-uppance. My chess title for this one is "Grand Fork".

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Do Space Pirates Need Special Sheets

Do Space Pirates Need Special Sheets?

This Crazy Tuesday, June 2nd is all about SPACE PIRATES and regular host "Row-hard" Rowena Cherry will be joined by "Madman" Mark Terence Chapman, "Dastardly" David Lee Summers and Jacquie "jolly" Rogers to plunder the icy blackness of space.

That's the blurb up on the PIVTR site. I apologize for the dreadfully bad "pirate" names, but for an unscripted, "blogging aloud" show that begins at 10 am Eastern (which is seven am for my nightowl, West Coast friends) and runs until 12.00 noon, I prefer to set a low standard and deliver better than expected.

I'm sure we will get into deeper topics, such as cloaking; motherships that look no different from regular traffic until it is too late for their victims to respond; space barratry (scuttling ships to hide theft of cargo); corsairing and privateering; and star ship commanders who pay lip service to Star Fleet Command, but do not necessarily comply with their orders... because who is to know? And perhaps if the politicians and generals back home had real time information, their orders would be different.

All credit to my friend Jacquie Rogers for getting me thinking (again) about sheets, and the logistics of hygiene, sex, and repose in deep space. Are space pirates simply Jack Sparrow with an air lock? I think not.

If Diana Groe's historically accurate Vikings managed to sustain an unfair seductive advantage over their European sexual rivals by wearing reasonably clean underwear, I wonder what the competitive advantage would be of body odor inside the confines of a space ark. Would it tend to demoralize and depress the enemy?

I should imagine there would be a product much like Procter and Gamble's Febreze. I hear that college students are using the odor eating product to simply spray the unwashed crotches of their jeans.




David Lee Summers is the author of five novels, and here is an excerpt from a guest blog he wrote for me to promote our June 2nd show.



The first of my novels is The Pirates of Sufiro, which starts off as the story of a band of space pirates that are marooned on a distant world they name Sufiro. Over the course of the novel, the pirates who were stranded have to battle corporate pirates who try to take over the planet. Thus the book explores the idea of "piracy" from multiple angles. I have recently explored my space pirate characters even more in stories appearing in the anthologies Space Pirates and Space Sirens published by Flying Pen Press. Another of my novels, Vampires of the Scarlet Order, is a supernatural thriller, but it features a cameo by the real life pirate, Grace O'Malley.

The phrase "space pirates" conjures up images of marauding bands cruising the galaxy in space ships. Perhaps the blaster-wielding captain has a robot parrot on his shoulder and some kind of high-tech eye-patch with a heads-up display. Movies and television have invoked this image numerous times and I think such pirates can be a lot of fun, even though they're often extremely campy.

Look a little harder at the idea of space pirates, though, and an interesting picture emerges. To summarize the United Nations definition of piracy, it is a criminal act of violence, detention or depredation committed by the crew or passengers of a ship or aircraft directed against another ship or aircraft – or directed against a ship, aircraft, persons or property outside the jurisdiction of a country. Apply that idea to any vessel that is either in space or operating on a distant world, and you open up tremendous story potential.

My own love of pirates started at an early age. I grew up in Southern California and was lucky enough to visit Disneyland a few times as a kid. One of my favorite rides from the time I was about six years old was The Pirates of the Caribbean. I was also a Star Trek fan from a very young age. Though a bit too young to remember the original series when it first ran, I was exactly the right age to watch Star Trek: The Animated Series when it ran on Saturday mornings. One of those episodes was "The Pirates of Orion" written by Howard Weinstein. I already was a fan of pirates and I just fell in love with the idea of pirates in space.

In the years after that, though, most depictions of space pirates that I came across grew painful. I saw far too many actors with robot parrots on their shoulders hamming it up for the camera. As I mentioned earlier, they could be fun to watch, but they did get old. I probably would never have even tried to write a story about space pirates if I hadn't come across the Bio of a Space Tyrant novels by Piers Anthony. In the first novel, Anthony introduced space pirates that were colorful and fun, but at the same time very dangerous. These were the kinds of space pirates I was looking for.

In 1988, I set out to write my first story of space piracy for a writing workshop in Socorro, New Mexico. I wanted to create pirates that were larger than life, fun, but yet a bit dangerous, much like the good space pirates I had encountered before. That's when Ellison Firebrandt and the crew of the Legacy who appear in The Pirates of Sufiro, Space Pirates and Space Sirens were born.

As I worked to create my pirates, I spent time in the library reading historical accounts, trying to get some idea for the motivations of historical pirates and how they operated. As I read, I found the stories of Henry Avery, Bartholomew Roberts, William Kidd, Anne Bonny and Mary Read particularly captivating.

Now, I believe it's important that a writer create a world where it's believable that space pirates exist. That said, if we postulate a universe where humans are colonizing other planets in the galaxy it's reasonable to expect that pirates will exist. In my "day" job I operate telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory. It's actually hard to imagine a star empire or galactic alliance with so much money that they could patrol every possible planetary system imaginable. Likewise, it's hard to imagine a future where everyone is so well off that someone won't be motivated to try to take what someone else has. Just recently, we had the incident of Somali pirates taking an American ship not far from American warships. Even with only a small boat and a few guns, they created a very difficult situation for this country. The galaxy is a much bigger place.

In my universe, Earth recognizes that it simply cannot patrol much of its territory at all with warships of any sort. It becomes much more practical for humans to issue Letters of Marque to pirate crews and allow them to harass ships from competing systems and colony worlds.

My pirate captain, Ellison Firebrandt, comes from a poor family. His father was a miner in the asteroid belt and it looked like Ellison's fate would either be to follow in his father's footsteps or go into some other hard labor for the rest of his life. As with the pirates of old, life aboard a pirate ship seemed to offer more freedom and opportunity for young Firebrandt than a life wasting away as a miner or a laborer for one of the giant corporations of Earth. Because Firebrandt is the protagonist of the stories in which he appears, I felt it necessary to give him a moral compass. He is loyal to Earth because the government provided his Letter of Marque. He kills and robs, but he does so with the intention of aiding Earth.

In the story "For a Job Well Done", which appears in the anthology Space Pirates, Firebrandt tries to fence stolen items through a gang that secretly pulls the strings on one of Earth's colony worlds. The gang maintains control through the torture of the planet's populace. In the process of discovering this, Firebrandt meets a woman named Suki Mori and a romance is born. Though Firebrandt is, himself, a criminal, his moral compass can't abide the self-serving interests of the gang he encounters and he feels compelled to stop them. Even though the story is science fiction, it was heavily influenced by contemporary headlines.

In the follow-up story entitled "Hijacking the Legacy" that appears in the anthology Space Sirens, Suki Mori discovers the cold hard reality that her new-found "friends" really are bloodthirsty pirates. She tries to escape but throws herself and the pirate crew right into the hands of a military captain that doesn't recognize Firebrandt's Letter of Marque. This puts Suki into a crisis of conscience. She recognizes that the crew of the Legacy is composed of criminals, but she also realizes that they're the ones who saved her from an even worse criminal gang. Can she simply let the pirates be killed?

Historically, not all pirates were clear-cut villains. They often came to piracy through a series of circumstances and choices. Often times there were no good choices for these people. Sometimes it was live as a slave or live as a pirate. Sometimes being a pirate seemed less horrible than being a crewman for a ship of the "legitimate" military. In creating my space pirates, I worked to create a universe that presented my characters with many of those kinds of difficult choices from history. I worked to create characters with enough of a moral compass that those choices were interesting ones to explore. Hopefully the stories are an exciting, fun ride as well!

If you would care to learn more about my novels and the anthologies where my stories appear, please visit davidleesummers.com and click on the links for "Books and Audio Books" and "Short Stories and Poems."

Or, visit David Lee Summers's blog on barratry
http://rocketpunk-manifesto.blogspot.com/2007/10/density-of-power.html



Mark Terence Chapman adds:

Rowena: Here's the premise behind the pirates in My Other Car is a Spaceship.

In my "universe", there are a number of alien civilizations in our sector of space, but none of them large enough or wealthy enough to patrol the space outside their respective territories. So pirates run amok in the "in-between" places, attacking remote settlements, mining colonies, and cargo ships traversing deep space. In addition to swag, some of the pirates trade in slaves.

Seeing the growing threat to commerce, a number of commercial outfits formed the Merchants' Unity, a sort of police force funded by the member merchants and tasked with the mission of suppressing the pirates and keeping them from disrupting interstellar commerce.

For many years, this worked. The Unity held the pirates to a nuisance-level only. Then one day, a pirate leader (a human ex-slave, whose grandparents were kidnapped from Earth) got a number of the pirate chieftains together and formed a corporation (BAE, Inc., short for Buck-an-Ear). Now organized (with stockholders and profit sharing), the pirates begin to attack in swarms instead of individually, overwhelming the Unity patrol ships and pushing the Unity to the brink of defeat.

Present-day Earth is unaware of any of this. But when a Unity ship patrolling our solar system (a pre-interstellar, and therefore embargoed system) loses both its pilots, it's forced to scour Earth for someone suitable, someone with the rare hypertasking gene that gives his mind the ability to handle thousands of simultaneous inputs.

It's into this universe that Colonel Hal Nellis, retired USAF fighter jock, is thrown. As pilot of Adventurer, he, along with Captain Kalen Jefffries (a son of human slaves), must find a way to defeat the seemingly overwhelming might of the pirates, or face the destruction of the Unity and the pillaging of a defenseless Earth.

[Bio: Mark is the author of three published science ficiton novels: The Mars Imperative, The Tesserene Imperative, and the just-released Sunrise Destiny. My Other Car is a Spaceship is his fourth, recently-completed, novel.)




As for the sheets question.... That is a matter of individual taste. Jacquie Rogers's pirates in her yet-to-be published novel that predated Fifth Element have special sheets to cope with bedding (verb) in zero gravity. Mark Terence Chapman's spacefarers are to be a surprise (to me). Some don't. In my first alien romance, Forced Mate, my high and mighty hero Tarrant-Arragon steals the love of his life's bedding from Earth to encourage her to feel more at home in his bed.

I've never visited a pirate's bed (in my books), but my Scythian pirates are a bit like downsized Chewbaccas with claws so with all that reddish hair, there's little need for modesty in bed.




Rowena Cherry
Space Snark

By the way, for those who do not know, you can download royalty free wallpaper and fabulous images from http://hubblesite.org/gallery/

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World

The mantra that has leaped out at me from every corner of my little world is, "The Business Model must change." It comes in variations: The Business Model has failed. The Business Model is obsolete. The Business Model is outdated.

The way to make a profit marketing anything is to have the right business model.

I wish they'd taught me about marketing in grammar school instead of harping on penmanship and drawing maps -- even the hours spent mastering spelling turned out to be a waste since now spellcheck does it for you as you type. And arithmetic? Even my phone has a calculator!

A fiction writer is the sole proprietor of a BUSINESS and thus needs a business model, and that business model must be correct or the writer won't turn a profit.

What does a writer do with profits? Buy bread, milk, cheese, DVDs, books, and pay the utility bills, rent and lowest on the list is usually clothes.

So a writer needs to know not only how to craft a terrific idea into a story, but must craft that story to a business model. If the end product does not fit the correct business model, the end product (the novel) can't be well marketed, and there will be no profit.

The artist side of our creativity listens to the bean counters and screams SELLOUT! But it's not really. It's opportunism.

What good is great art that molders away in the artist's basement? To do its job, art must connect with an art consumer.

The artist or writer in this case (writing is a performing art, as I learned from Alma Hill) has three choices.

1)Write anything you want and let it molder away unread by anyone but yourself.

2) Write what you want and build a mechanism for delivering what you want to the people who want it. That is build a delivery chute for your art.

3) Or be an oppotuntist and write what you want, what fires your creative furies, but first shape it so you can PACKAGE IT to fit down existing delivery chutes.

If you try to build your own delivery chutes and conveyor belts, (which is what startup ebook publishers are doing using new tools) you incur an additional overhead and take time and energy away from writing.

If you use existing delivery chutes, you may squash your art with the shrinkwrap, but most of your art will reach consumers hungry for that product.

What's happening today that has publishing melting down (and reforming), that has the very definitions of genre changing faster than publishers can invent logos, that has profits dwindling and copyright becoming an archaic term nobody understands -- what's happening today is THE BUSINESS MODELS OF THE WORLD ARE MELTING DOWN.

That's right. It's not just publishing that has foundations crumbling, it's every kind of business there is from autos to construction, and even Old Time Religion revivals.

Politically, we're all blaming it on the financial industry and its business model that collapsed in 2008 (the whole idea of distributing risk via derivative securities; mortgages that were securitized and sold abroad -- that's a business model of how to make money off of selling to people who can't afford to buy what you're selling).

But we, as writers, have to look at a much bigger picture here. The reason the financial industry was able to grow the securitization business model so explosively lies way outside the financial industry. Their brilliant idea for a business model was possible because of the computerization of the whole world. They did it all by computer! (and didn't spend the extra money necessary to figure out how to de-construct those securities when parts of the mortgages failed or needed refinancing.)

The people in the finance industry who know they operate on a business model, and are artistically creative enough to create new business models created one -- and it didn't work well at its first big test.

But it was a brilliant piece of creative work, inventing a CHUTE to deliver their PRODUCT to a hungry MARKET. They built a new mechanism to deliver product, and they built it out of the newest high-tech computerized materials.

Take GM and Chrysler as an example of the opposite phenomenon. They didn't change their bussiness model to a computerized high tech model fast enough -- by the time they put any real effort into tech, they were so far behind the times that at the first titanic blow from outside their industry, they collapsed.

Publishing is in the same situation. The biggest publishers still insist on doing business on paper, and even demand printed manuscripts. Hollywood script submissions are also still somewhat skewed toward paper copies!

The EPIC list ( http://www.epicauthors.com/links.html ) is always abuzz with the issues of e-book reading devices and e-publishing, new publishing companies, specific genre requirements, and advice to authors on how to promote your latest book from a small, independent e-publisher.

As a reviewer, I can say that some (maybe a lot) of these e-books are easily as well crafted as anything Manhattan is publishing in Mass Market. But they're usually aimed at a much narrower, smaller market.

But this is changing too, and changing fast. Soon, the e-book will be the mass market "chute" to put your product down, and paper books will be for narrow, specialty markets.

Today, however, the Mass Market paperback sells more copies of any given title than e-books do.

If you want your art to reach a broad market, you have to understand what it means "Mass Market" -- and how that relates to "High Concept" in screenwriting.

Notice the word MARKET in the title of the pocket sized paperback printed on cheap paper that yellows and crumbles in a couple decades or less. (some do have quality paper; you can tell because they cost more and feel heavy in your hand. Those pages will out-last the glue.)

What does it mean, "mass" market? It means HUGE. The Mass Market paperback is designed to be delivered down a CHUTE that has a wide bore and is very long, with many branches.

When you think Market, think of a huge factory making many copies of a thing, trucks and boxcars waiting outside, loading up and chugging off to deliver some of those things to various destinations where they'll be sold.

Think of Henry Ford inventing the assembly line to create cars the mass-market people could afford. He wasn't the first to hit on this concept, but he was the first to apply it to a product people wanted and make it work, the Model T Ford.

The entire innovation of the industrial revolution is based on UNIFORMITY. It's based on ARBITRARY CONVENTIONS. It's based on STANDARDIZATION.

Prior to the industrial revolution, everything was made by hand -- embroidered seat cushions, shoes made by a cobbler to match your own feet, patchwork quilts, rugs on a loom. No two looms or weavers were alike, no two die lots matched even almost, and no two copies of the same item were ever the same!

The business model of the master mason who built buildings, the farrier who shoed horses, the blacksmith who made plough blades and rifles, was based on the individual, specialized, made-to-fit, customized, and truly excellent item. The mastercraftsman sold his items on his reputation for excellence, not uniformity.

There was no such thing as "quality control" and "planned obsolescence" (where the factory puts out a certain percentage of lemons set just below the complaint-tolerance level of the consumer, and designs the object to fail after a certain amount of usage so the customer will buy another one).

The business model was UNIQUENESS + EXCELLENCE.

It became UNIFORMITY + BARELY-GOOD-ENOUGH.

Alvin Toffler wrote a (HC + Mass Market Paperback) non-fiction book in the 1970's called FUTURE SHOCK which also had some sequels that rode on the success of the first one but added little to his message. His message was that the business model was about to shift again, a paradigm shift prompted by the computer age, that would change things nobody at that time was even thinking ever could change.

He was right! He predicted what he called a return to the cottage industry of the customized item -- as opposed to the factory produced uniform item. He predicted that commuting to work in a centralized office would be replaced by telecommuting. He didn't predict the internet, but because of the internet, his predictions have come true.

The E-book publisher is essentially a cottage industry. They employ editors, writers, POD printers, website builders, and billing system such as Paypal, scattered all over the world. And they deliver a customized product, a Niche Product, rather than the Mass Market product.

The film industry has seen the rise of the Indie company producing niche films with craftsmanship worthy of awards. And you all know YouTube! Everyone with a cell phone can make a video to post on YouTube -- though they all don't grab as big an audience.

Toffler's theory was that technology would free us from having to conform ourselves to the median, to accept what the average person wants because the mass market product is cheaper. He predicted that the customized product would be cheaper than the mass market product.

So far, that prediction hasn't happened.

The e-book is not reaching the huge, MASS of the mass market yet.

The BUSSINESS MODEL of "mass" is being chisled away, but it hasn't collapsed yet.

Still, look at the Neilsen numbers on cable news shows --
http://www.nielsenmedia.com/nc/portal/site/Public/menuitem.43afce2fac27e890311ba0a347a062a0/?vgnextoid=9e4df9669fa14010VgnVCM100000880a260aRCRD

Keep in mind that there are about 310 MILLION people in the USA and the typical TV show only draws 23 million or so. Maybe 30-40 million for a big news event.

30 Million out of 300 million is not a MASS MARKET.

We seem to be a fragmented and fragmenting nation, but maybe not. See the article on Facebook and Twitter I've sited near the end of this blog entry.

Toffler's vision is coming true -- technology (900 TV channels, thousands more online sources of entertainment, thousands more e-books per day published than paper books) has shattered the Mass part of the Mass Market. Mass Market paperbacks don't sell nearly what they once did to a much smaller nation (60 Million -- and a product had to reach a third of those to be successful.)

We have more choices and less knowledge of how to make wise choices.

Another of Toffler's predictions is coming to pass. His book was called FUTURE SHOCK because it predicted that the rate of change in the fundamental rules of living, working productively, and making wise choices among products would change faster than the basic human brain can adjust.

Toffler predicted that humans would go into a state of "shock" (being unable to think) because of the pace of change. He based this on the ability to adapt with age. In Medieval times, the methods and wisdom you learned from your father would last you all your life, and still be true when you died of old age.

A cobbler, for example, who knew the best method of dying shoe leather would end his career using that same method and it would still be state-of-the-art, though his grandson might encounter an improvement, but it would only be a slight improvement and it wouldn't shatter the cobbler business model.

Human beings need that kind of stability over their lifetimes. But technology has lengthened lifetimes and it looks like it will lengthen career-lifetimes. Meanwhile, whole industries have come and gone, and our methods of doing everything have been shifted on their foundations by (as Toffler predicted) the computerization of the world.

(and computerization has hardly BEGUN to penetrate all the way through this world)

Those who lived through the industrial revolution "came in off the farm" -- you can't keep 'em down on the farm was the song and slogan. Young people abandoned life on the land for the cities, and went to work in factories where they could make a fortune doing the same thing all day over and over.

And those factories turned out masses of identical objects.

That business model now co-exists (think Neanderthal and Homo sapiens) with the computer driven E-business model.

The E-business model is dissolving the foundation of the Mass Production business model faster than humans can adapt, so some older people still cling to the older model (and that's what collapsed GM) while some younger people grab for any crazy thing that's possible to do with the new tools (which caused the collapse of the financial system).

OK, now what's this image of the world got to teach writers about marketing?

One of the foundation cornerstones of the Mass Market Paperback business model is that authors are never EVER allowed to do their own marketing. In the 1970's, that began to fall away, and today, it's shifted entirely to the other end -- most authors, especially in e-books -- are required to do their own marketing (finance or make YouTube videos, online banner ads, virtual blog tours, and anything they can think of).

Meanwhile, authors aren't paid more to cover the expense of self-marketing.

The mass market business model is tilting dangerously askew because of this. The Mass Market model only works with a market that's massive in size. And with those markets, the publicists hired by the publisher (usually working in-house) do manage to reach reviewers and get buzz started about a book.

Note what Colby Hodge said in her blog entry here
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/when-story-doesnt-work.html

Colby has swerved into a LARGER mass market because it's open to her, Historicals. Mysteries are still big. Westerns are gone. Romance is big, but (Toffler again) Romance is fragmenting. Mysteries are fragmenting too. Customization is slowly replacing Standardization which replaced customization even more slowly!

Since the cost per item is lowered by mass production, more people can afford to buy the item, and thus the item reaches more people in total. 10% hard-core fans made is 10,000 from a book that sells 100,000 copies, and 40,000 from a book that sells 400,000 copies.

How can an artist do this and keep their integrity?

By understanding the concept MARKETING from the inside and then applying that understanding to art.

The writer is essentially a creative person. The solution to every problem in life is to create something new that has never existed before and can't be copied because it is unique.

That is what storytelling is all about -- being unique. Being the only one telling this story. Being the single source for this customized product.

Your story, your characters, your plot, your theme are fresh, new, different, and therefore exciting. You know your story will ignite ravenous hunger for more in your fans, if only they knew you exist and could find your novel.

Writers entering the marketplace today have a unique problem.

"The Marketplace" is standing on a crumbling foundation, tilting worse that the Leaning Tower of Pizza.

New writers today have a career decision to make that no writer has ever had to make before.

You can write for the market that will, I'm sure, replace this one as the high-profit-margin business model, the e-book that is tailored and customized.

You can write for the old, traditional Mass Market that's still reaching a much wider (but diminishing) audience than the e-book and work at a fair but diminishing profit.

In other words, you can try to use the delivery chutes that e-book publishers are beginning to learn to build, or you can try to use the delivery chutes that Mass Market publishers are using.

In either case, before you "have an idea" for a story, you need to study the size and shape of the chute that will deliver it to your market, and you need to study that market, and train your subconscious to "have" ideas that fit the delivery chute you have chosen.

Business people create chutes. Writers fill them.

Some writers have both skill sets, and I've found lately that the currently most successful writers come out of the business community, with a background in commercial art, advertising art, advertising writing, and every aspect of managing a business.

But to be able to do your own, personalized, individualized creative art with its unique aspects intact, your integrity unblemished, and still reach a Mass Market customer base, you must create an idea that is already formulated to fit a commercial market.

Over the last 5 years, I've seen e-book publishers reinventing that uniformity of product. Profit lies in creating large numbers of identical things, so the unit price comes down.

That principle has been eroded but not replaced.

So writers need to learn how to apply wild, unbridled creativity to one part of the product they produce, and uniformity, conformity, and standardization to the other part.

The part of the story that has to "fit down the chute" -- has to be uniform. It has to be exactly like every other story that the chute was designed to deliver to a particular audience.

Imagine, if you swung through the Mall shopping 'till you dropped, and hit up the vending machine for a coke. You feed your bill into the slot and poke the button. Down comes the red can. Pop! Take a swig. IT'S 7-UP!!! Some people would spew it out on passers-by in shock, and scream for their money back. You might be more restrained, but still irked.

Our whole society and all our expectations are configured by standardization, uniformity, conformity.

We buy a coke; we want coke in the can.

It's the same way with novels. Buy a Romance, you want an HEA ending. Buy an Alien Romance, or a Paranormal, you want plenty of complications but satisfaction in the end, anyway.

Buy a Horror Novel, you want to be creeped out big time, right?

Romance, and Horror are two "chutes" that conduct a product from your mind to your reader's mind.

These chutes have been built by businesses with business models, and they depend on the standardization aspect of the product to make it fit down the chute and arrive at the correct audience. The genre formulas are the packaging, the standard aspect of the art. Plots, characterization, story, theme all are standardized so that marketers know what to market your art "as."

If they guess wrong, and package and market 7-Up as Coke, the market will evaporate.

Meanwhile, another part of the fiction market has been thriving on the return to customization. Board games such as Dungeons & Dragons which became all the rage in create-it-yourself fiction rely on a standardization of story and elements, put together in a creative way by a "dungeon master" who marshalls the playing group. The fun is in the group activity, and the push-pull among the players for command of the customization of their stories.

Board games still exist and are enjoyed, but the BUSINESS MODEL now still growing despite the recession is VIDEO-GAMES. The battle of the game-console technology is heating up, and online gaming is huge and growing (World of Warcraft; Second Life etc etc.)

The video and online gaming is an example of the new business model Toffler predicted, which discards standardization. But even in these games, uniform "rules" and standard ways of deploying resources (rolling dice for "powers" for your character) are what make the game go.

If you market a game that doesn't generate its rules via the standard formula, players won't flock to it. They don't want to learn everything from scratch in order to create their own fiction with your game no more than readers want to learn to read all over again just to read your book.
Today more young people play video games than read books.

What's going on there?

Maybe it's not what everyone thinks it is. Maybe it's not that young people don't want to READ. Or can't read.

Maybe it's what Toffler predicted. Customization replacing Standardization. Younger people growing up in the electronic age are embracing the new world their elders can't stretch to accomodate. They are willing to work to customize their tools (phones) and entertainment. They don't want to let someone else do it for them and make it like everyone else wants it to be. They want to make it their own way -- just like us creative artists want to write our own stories our own ways, not to fit the delivery chutes the marketers have built to suit their business model.

The basic human being can accept only so many paradigm shifts in one lifetime, and there have been several huge, basic "throw every skill you have out the window and start from scratch" paradigm shifts in the last 30 years. Everyone today who is over 50 is suffering some kind of FUTURE SHOCK.

Several times in a lifetime is just way too fast for humans.

Those who reject customization (some people have trouble programming their ring tones!) say things like "I prefer the feel of real books" despite the fact that a good e-book reader can customize the font to be more readable to old eyes. But of course, the "quality" (i.e. standardization) of the fiction available in the format can be an issue, too. Amazon's Kindle program is trying to break down that barrier by presenting the same Mass Market fiction as Kindle downloads.

The biggest innovation with Kindle that may reshape our landscape is that they deliver newspapers and magazines via Kindle download that is supposed to be hassle free for the computer-averse. That may save the business model of newspapers and magazines.

One day, the kids born in the 1990's will cling to their video consoles, e-book readers or handheld device despite the availability of something new that their children feel is "better."

How do you market fiction into this changing world?

Do you customize or standardize? Where, in the structure of fiction, does the creative writer get to create?

If you decide you'll have to build your own delivery chute between yourself and your consumer, here is a story about a person Jean Lorrah ran into at MediaWest Convention.

---------FROM JEAN LORRAH via email -------------------------

One of the reasons we do conventions: I just did a podcast with Mark Eller, who became a podcaster to publicize his own books. Here is the information for finding the interview online, though he doesn't know exactly when he will post it:

Bookmark http://www.podfeed.net/podcast/Chronicles+with+Mark+Eller/17298 . Then watch for an episode featuring me. In five minutes I managed to plug simegen.com, lochness-monster.com , tipsonwriting, jeanlorrah.com , the Sime~Gen books, the Nessie books, and the Savage Empire books.

Mark, at age 50, has suddenly fallen into a bunch of connections that have brought about the sale of seven of his books to small presses and his being chosen as a judge for a "reality" TV show on the CW network called The Write Stuff. http://www.thewritestufftv.com/ . The CW is a small network, but it is on most cable systems.

The premise of the show is that writers today have to do a heck of a lot more than writing for their books to succeed, and on the show they will have to demonstrate their abilities to do everything. What they win is a small press single-book contract and a marketing campaign, but who knows? If they get the 30 million viewers that they hope for, and one-thirtieth of them buy the book, it will be a huge best-seller.

It is VERY clear that the winner will not be the best writer, but the cleverest marketer among the contestants. But unfortunately that's what book publishing is today.

---------------END FROM JEAN LORRAH via email -----------------

Now that's an example of a man who is building a new fiction-delivery-chute.

And it's going in the right direction -- MEDIA. Via the podcast which is internet radio, usually voice only but sometimes with video now, niche audiences are being configured for each of thousands of special interests.

The total population of the world is growing fast, and the cost-per-unit of customized product is dropping fast. Where the two trends meet, niche marketing will explode.

Thus we have the call-in talk show done with online radio! And online radio advertising customized for novelists to promote their own work.

---------------FROM A PROMOTIONAL EMAIL ---------------

PIVTR has another new program in its line-up. It's called "Crazy Tuesday" (c) 07.

What's that? What is "Crazy Tuesday?" I'm delighted you asked.

"Crazy Tuesday" (c) 07 takes place on the first Tuesday of each month. Between the hours of 10 to 2 p.m. eastern standard time for $100, an author, playwright, screenwriter, actor/actress, free-lance, independent, publishing company, publicist, agent, the world can promote, market, brand, sell, advertise (whatever is clean and wholesome. PIVTR is a family station!) to get the word out about you and your product.

Contact Lillian for all of the details.

Don't delay. The first Tuesday of July and September are already booked!!

LCauldwell @ internetvoicesradio.com

Let the WORLD know about you!

Check out the website and look around: http://internetvoicesradio.com

----------------END PROMOTIONAL EMAIL---------------------

Web radio is another whole new business-model-busting tech application fragmenting the mass market and the underlying concept of standardization. It's a result of a huge paradigm shift, and many people are just shrugging off web radio as unimportant. It is, however, a harbinger of what is yet to come. (we've barely started on computerizing the world)

The production cost is way down because there's no broadcast antenna, huge airwave license fee, and electric bill. Some simple equipment that's easily available, some software specializing in recordings that can be webcast, a short but steep learning curve, and the talented and determined are in business, building a niche audience for a customized product.

The audiences on web radio are large and growing. Like e-books, the audience size doesn't rival Mass Market media like Cable and Broadcast TV, but like e-books this entertainment delivery system is chiselling away at the foundations of the mass market business model.

That foundation is Standardization. Standardization was developed to reduce unit costs to where the vast majority of people could afford the product if they wanted it.

Cost reduction via technology is making standardization obsolete in certain aspects of product design -- the aspects that the consumer can customize themselves.

Microsoft rose to dominance on standardizing the platform (Windows) and letting developers create applications all of which run on the same command sets and design look.

Their success changed the business model of the computing world that Toffler was familiar with. And yet his predictions are coming true, one by one.

The lesson writers can take away from all this is that success in this churning market depends on standardizing the invisible and the user interface -- letting the consumer customize everything else.

See my post on Web 2.0. The Web concept failed, and it's being patched with customizing tools like RSS feeds, news and social networking aggregators, twitter aggregators, etc.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

For a writer, that means standardize your plot structure then use your creative art to induce the reader to IMAGINE THEIR OWN STORY using your story as a springboard into their own story.

Your product is no longer your own story. In this changing world, your product is fuel for your readers' imagination in ways it never could be before.

And it's all about marketing, not writing talent. The best marketer will win.

Check out this recent news story on Yahoo Tech news

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090522/tc_nm/us_summit_social_2
----------quote-----------
And analysts and investors, in search of the next Google-like hit, are paying close attention to the breakneck speed at which Facebook and Twitter are adding new users.

While the popularity of the two social media firms has yet to translate into the kind of revenue-generating machine that Google Inc developed with its search advertising business, some say Facebook and Twitter have become so central to the Internet experience that they are inherently valuable.
...
Facebook grew to 200 million active users in April, less than a year after hitting 100 million users.

----------end-quote--------

Note that 200 million. Check the sizes of the average TV shows in viewers. Small wonder advertisers are abandoning TV -- which can be seen as each hour carries more and more minutes of ads instead of show. They're desperately trying to get enough advertising bucks to keep the shows on the air.

Read that exerpt. Listen to how they think and how they talk. "monetize" "adding new users" "inherently valuable" -- and "internet experience" !!! --

Amusement and Entertainment (which is what novels are) has become an "experience."
Interactive, and most of all customized, experience.

The whole social networking phenomenon is an example of customized entertainment. And it's being made into a mass market product. But the current business model can't figure how to monetize it, and that figuring is indeed being done by people so young they probably never read Alvin Toffler's brilliant bit of futurology, Future Shock.



Toffler was right about so much, chances are the answers are in there.

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

Source of the Expository Lump

I was recently asked to evaluate the first 2 chapters of a novel which I have watched this author develop. It's main target is to become a TV Series -- and I believe the premise has the potential to draw in Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Battlestar Galactica (2) fans.

The premise is rich, deep and broad, the worldbuilding meticulous, the scope nearly infinite. It could be a huge story writ on a galactic canvas (like The Lensman Series) or more like Dallas, mostly set in one place (this solar system) but about the people and inter-related families.

The concept is dazzling, the flexibility of the material designed to allow many authors to contribute. I've seen some of the outline and "bible" material, and I'm entranced.

So I was delighted to get electronic copy of the first 2 chapters in novel style that I could read on my Palm.

Right off, I fell into Writing Teacher mode, being more "critical" than I would be if I were reading this for review. And you all know how picky I am about books I review! Can you imagine being the target of my "find something wrong" mode of reading? Ouch.

Still, because I love the premise as much as this author does, I avidly devoured the first 2 chapters. It helped that I was sitting in a) a dentist waiting room, and then b) a car repair shop waiting room. When I finished, I stared at the wall a while before I decided what exactly I was noticing in this first draft manuscript.

A final draft should read in such a way that the Writing Teacher mode never notices anything.

The story should unfold beat by beat, each beat where it belongs but the content leaping with flames of delight. The author should be invisible; the story vivid.

One doesn't expect that in first draft. First drafts are for debugging. So I read looking for bugs.

The sentence, paragraph and word-choice work in this first draft is top drawer professional. The visual descriptions will make any producer salivate. As I said before, the worldbuilding is superb. The characters are likewise, vivid and well rounded, deep and fundamentally interesting. What is presented in the first 2 chapters is intriguing.

So what's WRONG? Why is this text dragging? Why don't the characters leap off the page? Why won't it translate in my mind into a script? What rules is it violating?

OK, as I was reading, I mentally marked out paragraphs for deletion because they were EXPOSITORY LUMPS. But this is first draft material. Any writer, however experienced, passes some Lumps when drafting an opening. You just delete them, or shred them and sprinkle throughout the rest of the story, and what's left is usually a fantastic opening.

Rewriting is no big deal. You expect to do that, and it's largely a mechanical exercise when it comes to curing the lumpiness of a piece of goods. In fact, the classic cure is to move the opening scene to a later point in the story, skipping over the throat-clearing and pencil sharpening.

But this particular 2 chapter opening is "right" for the story this author is telling. Two conflicting elements smash together explosively kicking off a huge Interplanetary War Story.

But the whole thing just does not WORK. Why?

Well, when you delete ALL the Expository Lumps in this 2 chapter opening, you haven't got anything left that's 2 chapters long. Nothing happens. It's all "about to happen" -- not happened and creating consequences. There's no because-line; no plot line.

The author has told me how much FUN it is to be writing this story at last. It's exciting and fulfilling and very real. The characters are jumping up and down to get their story told.

Well. That is the problem, you see. The author has held back on writing the story while the background develops, fleshes out, becomes dimensional. The characters have lives and histories, and backstory-gallore. The politics, history, technological advances (this is set in a near future century when humans have colonized the solar system) and elaborate backstory on the colonization and its politics.

The source of the expository lump is the author's own familiarity with the material.
The author knows too much. The author started to write the story too late in the creation process. Screenwriting books warn over and over about starting to write too early in the creation process. These 2 chapters are an example of what happens when you start too late.

Both too soon and too early result in just about the same kind of unusable text, delineated with TELL rather than SHOW. Both result in a text sequence that weights every detail with the same importance, instead of prioritizing.

If the writer doesn't yet know the world, the writing process turns into worldbuilding block by block of impenetrable prose about the background instead of storytelling. If the writer knows the world too well, the writer is afraid the reader won't understand the story without all that the writer knows, so writing turns into an info-dump instead of storytelling.

And that, in essence, is what an Expository Lump is -- some rich-delicious detail that the writer wants the reader to know all about IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND the emotional, strategic, and political import of the events in the character's life.

The reason these events are important is TOLD rather than SHOWN (or dramatized).

Exposition is "about" the facts, an explanation of the facts. It is what the writer thinks the reader needs to know before starting the story or getting on with the events that form the because-line of the plot.

Exposition is the data that goes into the equation, not the equation itself (the plot and story are two variables in the equation that is a work of fiction). The equation is the problem the reader is working in his mind while the writer feeds in the data. Exposition doesn't register with a reader as data and isn't put into the equation.

Exposition is rhetoric laced with opinion, slant, and possibly the omniscient point of view. It is everything the character already knows before the reader arrives.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/exposition gives a more dictionary sort of definition. Exposition is the writer's effort to make the reader understand "things" the exact same way the writer does.

The writer wants very much to share this vision, this story, this imagined world with the reader.

The writer wants to draw the reader in to the dreamscape using photographic reality. And the writer desperately wants the reader to enter into the exact dreamscape the writer is in. It has to be THE SAME DREAMSCAPE, so therefore everything (absolutely everything) has to be described in detail and explained back to twenty years before the story starts (or twenty centuries).

But in order to gain entree into the dreamscape, the reader needs a Japanese Brush Painting of the "reality" the writer has created -- not a digital photograph with sharp detail.

New writers (and experienced, published writers just starting a new project) can't do this -- simply CAN not do brush-painting style evocation.

Why?

Because without all the relevant details, the reader MIGHT NOT GET IT.

The reader might make other assumptions, mistake the hero for the villain, or think the main character is behaving without sufficient motivation.

Motivations have to be explained -- in exposition. Because otherwise, the reader might guess wrong!

Exposition says, "This is MY story and you have to understand it MY WAY - or otherwise don't read my story."

Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me to understand that expository lumps come from the writer standing in the "wrong place" to tell the story. She called this kind of overly detailed storytelling "self-indulgent." The writer is standing in a self-indulgent psychological space -- demanding the reader enter into the writer's own story, and no other.

Being jarred out of that "place" is what makes a talented amateur into a seasoned professional writer.

There is a knack, and a talent, and also a learned skill to handling expository lumps.

You can never avoid depositing them on your page. You must learn to handle them.

The skill part is learning to dissect a lump into its component parts, preferably even before you've finished inputting the entire lump in words.

Recognizing you are passing a lump is just a matter of practice. The more diligently you rewrite, the more your subconscious will learn to recognize something "wrong" before you finish entering it. But sometimes you have to finish writing the lump before you know what to do with it.

Lumps consist of "important" and even "vital" information the reader actually wants all twined around stuff the reader isn't (yet) ready for.

There can be elements of the characters' backstory -- who the father was, when the mother died and of what University they all went to -- things about the character's backstory that are characterization, motivation, color, and even worldbuilding (such as this alien species marries and raises children before going to grammar school).

There can be elements of politics, office or national level, perhaps what political party the character is registered in, or how the career was blunted because of supporting the wrong person for promotion.

There can be elements of description -- how the room is furnished, floor plan of the apartment, what's visible out the window, what people are wearing (which can also be worldbuilding), what type of computer or handheld device, how clean or dirty things are, what kind of music is playing.

There can be the reasons why things are the way they are in this scene -- and those reasons can involve other characters, other places, decisions made and executed long ago or recently. Lumps usually refer to things, issues, and situations that are "offstage" -- thus theoretical and abstract to the reader who hasn't yet been "backstage" of this story.

Those categories of expository lump material are not the only categories. And a clever writer can disguise all that in a nicely flowing narrative that is interesting and engaging. So how do you test your own words to see if you've committed a Lump?

A) identify WHY you wrote that particular information in exactly this particular place. If it is because YOU want the reader to know it; delete it.

B) identify WHY you think the reader is dying to know this information. Find where you've created suspense on this issue prior to this point.

C) consider if there is any other way to convey this information to the reader. What would it take to convert that ONE PARAGRAPH into "show" rather than "tell?" A whole chapter maybe? Another whole character with speaking part?

D) delete the Lump and reread the whole story again a few days later. If you can't retype the Lump into the story without looking at what you deleted, then it shouldn't be added back.

The first mistake new writers make is to misplace information. The expository lump in Chapter One may in fact contain vital information to make Chapter 10 work, but that doesn't mean it belongs in Chapter One. There is a "rule" for conveying information to a reader without causing the reader boredom, impatience, or pain.

The rule in information feed is FIRST MAKE THE READER CURIOUS. Then make the reader even more curious. Ratchet up the suspense.

If there's something you, the writer, desperately need the reader to know, DON'T TELL IT.

Withhold that information until you feel the suspense in your own gut. Use characters and events, deeds and decoration, red herrings, but mostly foreshadowing to create suspense. Set up a question the answer to which lies in the information, but don't answer the question until the right moment.

Read up on writing craft techniques for creating suspense. Draw the suspense TIGHT, and then tighter, until when you break the suspense by presenting the tidbit of information, the reader is so relieved to find out that it's pleasure not pain to learn it.

Remember, people come to read fiction for pleasure. Don't make them work at it. Make it fun!

Play the game with the reader. You've read a good book or two; you know what that game is.

It's FUN!

So the process of breaking up a lump requires you to tease it apart until all the facts you've included stand separately. (some people would write down a list) Identify why you think the reader is dying to know each item on the list -- and most importantly, why you want the reader to know, and know it right now -- or maybe later will do.

Consider what the reader might imagine if you don't give the information.

Try leaving the information out. That will leave space for the reader to fill in the color, the backstory, the characterization, the details and make the world their own. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go watch some TV shows that have reams of fan fiction posted about them -- then go read the fan fiction that fills in the gaps from the televised show.

That's what readers pay writers for -- to unleash their own imagination, not to demonstrate the writers'imagination.

Marion Zimmer Bradley often repeated the quote, "The story the reader reads is not the story the writer wrote." I don't have the original attribution handy, but it was an important point she made often.

The grim reality is that readers don't want to read YOUR story.

Readers want to experience their own story their own way. You, as writer, are there only to provide the template for the entertainment -- you are the band playing the dance music, not the dance instructor leading everyone's moves on the dance floor. So don't provide too much detail and discipline -- open up the vision with a few brief, artistically chosen details so that the reader fills in the rest and makes your story their own.

In my Tuesday Aug. 19, 2008 post

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/wrting-as-artform-performing-art.html

I talked at length about how writing is a performing art. When you commit an Expository Lump, you are not performing, you're listening to the prompter (your own imagination) whisper your lines then repeating them in a dull monotone.

When it comes to backstory, you have many tools beyond exposition.

You have dialogue, sparse brush painting style description, actions (actors call it business) that speak louder than words, and narrative. Don't forget flashback, but that's a real tricky technique. Even though you move back in time, you must keep the story moving forward.

Marion Zimmer Bradley often described exposition as the writer popping up out of the paper to stand on the page, blow a whistle, and call TIME OUT while the writer explains the story to the reader, thus blowing the reader's suspension of disbelief, destroying the dreamy mood, peeling the readers' feet out of the characters' moccasins, and basically ruining the whole thing. The writer's "style" pre-empts the reader's imagination. So now the story is no longer fun to read.

So after deleting everything you possibly can from your Lump (keep the trimmings aside in a note file because you probably will need to put it in later; just because you're deleting it doesn't mean you're scrapping it), convert the rest of the Lump that really has to go here to Show rather than Tell.

Yes, this will take many more words and make the story longer, may require another character, or even a sub-plot and additional chapters. So you must choose with your artistic senses what to discard and what to show. Show only those things that really ADVANCE THE PLOT forward.

The key to choosing which details to expound upon and which to delete (even though in your mind's eye, you see the deleted ones -- the reader gets to choose their own details) is your THEME.

Any detail from your Lump which illustrates the theme can stay if you really need it to advance the plot. Any detail which does not illustrate or explicate the theme has to go no matter what else you have to change. Everything in the composition must explicate the theme(s) of this particular piece. Otherwise, what you've produced isn't art, nevermind performing art.

So now we see that Expository Lumps destroy the reader's enjoyment because they force the reader to see it your way while what the reader is paying you for is to stoke up their own imagination so they can see it their own way.

But the reader is also paying for a rip-roaring good story, and that means a story that moves, a plot that rocks!

How do you achieve that with all this background to stuff into the reader's head?

Keep in mind one of my simple definitions I've repeated many times here.

Action = Rate Of Change of Situation. Or PACING = Rate of Change of Situation.

Hollywood has set the standard for pacing in all genres. Novels now are hitting this standard, too. I review, remember. I read lots of books. Change has happened.

The Situation must change materially every 3 pages of script (according to several courses I've taken recently) -- or in a book every 3 pages of manuscript (or about every 750 words which is a rule I learned from A. E. Van Vogt in the 1950's and it has become the rule today.)

With a discipline like that, you won't produce any expository lumps because during a Lump the Situation can't change.

In fact, that's a good definition of Lump. It's a lump because it stops the flow of the story, the changes that generate the plot. Events don't "happen" inside a Lump. A Lump tells you about events that aren't happening right now or to these people.

And that's a good test to see if a paragraph is an Expository Lump or not. If the Situation of the plot has changed during that paragraph (not the reader's understanding of the Situation, but the actual Situation as the main character sees it) then it's not a Lump.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://www.slantedconcept.com/

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