Crossing Genres

A publisher called Obsidian Butterfly is assembling an anthology to be titled "NecronomiRomCom," comprising Cthulhu Mythos romantic comedies:

Obsidian Butterfly

Working on a story to submit to this project reminded me of a panel at this year's RavenCon about mixing genres. A panelist asked what would be the most unlikely combination of genres. Of course, many mashups of classic novels with horror exist, such as PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS, and LITTLE WOMEN AND WEREWOLVES, but I'm not sure they count, consisting mostly of slightly revised texts of public-domain originals with horror content tacked on. Paranormal romance and various permutations of historical, SF, or futuristic romance have become recognized subgenres in their own right. Historical mysteries are also commonplace, as a natural outgrowth of the quest for fresh settings in which to place unsolved murders. Historical fantasy and horror aren't much of a stretch, either. Mystery is compatible with many other genres, and a romance subplot can be included in almost any kind of fiction. Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series combines alternate history, fantasy, and mystery. Effective, credible crossovers of that kind require the setting and the magical rules to be clearly and consistently laid out for the reader, with no cheating.

Novels of secret histories that transform famous people of the past into fighters against supernatural evil demand more suspension of disbelief. Authors have made Abraham Lincoln a vampire slayer and Queen Elizabeth the First a hunter of demons. A duology by Cherie Priest, MAPLECROFT and CHAPELWOOD, pits Lizzie Borden, in her reclusive later years, against Lovecraftian monsters. (In this version of her life, she really did kill her father and stepmother, but only because they were possessed by eldritch entities from the sea.)

The Cthulhu Mythos seems to be a favorite candidate for genre-blending. The anthology SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET merges the worlds of Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes, a not terribly unbelievable combination. There's at least one anthology of stories set in a postapocalyptic world where HPL's extradimensional monsters have conquered Earth. Plunging into the realm of the absurd, SCREAM FOR JEEVES, by Peter H. Cannon, retells several of Lovecraft's best-known stories by inserting P. G. Wodehouse's characters and style into them. Probably the most incongruous cross-genre mashup I've ever encountered, however, is an anthology titled THE CALL OF POOHTHULHU--H. P. Lovecraft meets Winnie-the-Pooh.

Or how about colorful Lovecraftian board books for small children? A Mythos alphabet book is one of several cute products from the "C Is for Cthulhu" project:

C Is for Cthulhu

Has anybody here run into an unlikelier combination?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 14 - Ripping A Headline For Theme

Worldbuilding From Reality

Part 14

Ripping A Headline For Theme

Previous entries in Worldbuilding From Reality are indexed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

On Facebook back in May, 2020, I ran across a comment on a Headline I considered extremely "rip-able" -- so much drama entwined in the scenes behind such headlines.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/16/state-department-inspector-general-fired-democrats-decry-dangerous-pattern-retaliation/

The article is fraught with emotionally loaded, semantically powerful, language which drives inexorably toward a specific conclusion, and careful reading of the article reveals much about the very nature of theme.

We have discussed theme and targeting an audience many times, looking at the use of theme from many angles.

One of the most commercial uses of Theme in fiction creation is simply to target an audience.  This article illustrates that usage in journalistic prose.  Master writing articles in this style to insert into Chapters where your protagonist needs to learn something about the theme of his story, her life.

Theme is a statement (or question)  about some matter of ultimate concern -- but what matters concern an audience varies with the average age of the audience, maybe gender, maybe economic status, maybe political bias, whether they believe the HEA is real or wish-fulfillment-fantasy.

Currently, we are in an election-of-a-lifetime, and it truly is a life or death election for many people who have had their lives ruined by the shut down.  Some see the shut down as due to a virus that may or may not have been deliberately created, maybe not genetically engineered but just deliberately bred, and weaponized.  Others see it as an artifact of malfunctioning government.

We can only imagine what might have happened, and we've all seen enough horror movies to have vivid imaginations about what governments might do, while journalism is agitating our imagination.

So, no matter who is in charge of a government and no matter what that person might do with government power, most of the people will just purely hate that person.

It's natural to hate anything that coerces you -- including parents, and even the most passionate Soul Mate.

We all understand striking back at people whose actions constrain our actions.

So we impute our own most probable motives to those who strike back and to those who constrain.  We imagine ourselves into the characters portrayed in the real-life news, and firmly believe we know what went on behind the scenes.  As long as we're governed by humans, we're probably pretty close to accurate.

Because we understand the world in fictional terms, journalism has learned to extract, distill and present to us a "narrative" -- a plot, a because-line of events -- that leads us to conclude whatever the owners of the news outlet want us to conclude.

In fiction writing, we use the term "show don't tell" to indicate that we must portray, illustrate, but never come out and SAY IT to the reader.

The reader will believe what the reader figures out for themselves, NOT what the writer tells them to believe.  So we show emotions, but we don't name them.

This technique of inducing the reader to adopt a specific conclusion by figuring it out for themselves has been perfected by journalism.

By carefully editing away extraneous or confusing events, focusing on a "narrative" the journalists lead the audience to believe something that will motivate the audience to act in a certain way -- vote for a particular candidate, or vote for someone they hate just to get a particular policy enacted.

This is called "slant" in journalism, and "genre" in fiction.

It is the selective recreation of reality with emphasis on selective.

The particular issue being highlighted doesn't matter.  What matters is the spotlight of the highlighting.  As in stagecraft the spotlight has to "follow" the actor -- making everything else shadowed, but real and acknowledged. The spotlight shows the audience what to pay attention to, and what to ignore.

Taking the spotlighted issue of the era (say, Climate Change, Weapons In Space, Financial Malfeasance In Office, Government Funding, anything really) and extracting from it a THEME you can use in fiction to enthrall your reader is the foundation of good writing.

Write about what the reader is interested in, but say something on that topic that the reader does not expect.

The THEME is what you have to say about the issue, but a theme is an abstraction, a principle of reality as you understand it, or as your Main Character understands or misunderstands it.  The Main Character then learns through the Plot Events of the novel.  That's Character Arc.

For example: In my Romantic Times Award Winning novel, Dushau
https://www.amazon.com/Dushau-Trilogy-3-Book/dp/B0725GLJL5/

I used the overall theme of "Innocent Until Proven Guilty" to generate a plot driven by an unjust accusation making a fugitive out of an innocent non-human who couldn't comprehend the injustice.

This is a theme dear to my heart, and so when I see any hint of it in real-world headlines, it gets me revved up.

That happened with this Washington Post article to my Facebook Feed.

So one of my Facebook contacts summarized the meat of the article in a way that drew many comments.

----quote------
It should be noted that the investigation here involved whether or not Pompeo and his wife used a federal employee for personal errands.

State Department inspector general fired as Democrats decry ‘dangerous pattern of retaliation’ State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was fired Friday in a late-night ouster that drew condemnations from Democrats, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warning of an acceleration in a “dangerous pattern of retaliation” against federal watchdogs.

Linick, a 2013 Obama appointee who has criticized department leadership for alleged retribution toward staffers, will be replaced by Ambassador Stephen J. Akard, a State Department spokesperson confirmed Friday. It was the latest in a string of weekend removals of oversight officials who have clashed with the Trump administration.

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

Way down the active comment thread, someone said something that prompted me to reply:

-----
It's not supposed to be "investigate this person to see if they did this crime" -- it's supposed to be, "here's a crime somebody did, FIND THE CULPRIT."
-----

Someone commented:

------
When the crime is misuse of an employee's time, it is difficult not to look at the employer as the source of the directions being followed.
----------

Which is so true, I stared at it a long while before replying:

---------
Yes, and the most attractive suspect is rarely the culprit.
---------

So one of the other commenters on the thread jumped in with:

---
Really? Where did you find statistics supporting that claim?
-------

And then added:

--------

In reality both approaches are used; that's how the DEA goes after drug cartel members, among other criminals. Sometimes you just know someone is guilty; the problem is finding good evidence that proves your case.

---------

Clearly that double comment had come after a reaction somewhat like mine -- thinking hard about the entire context.  But he was thinking in an entirely different context than I was thinking.

So I wrote the following long-essay reply:

-------
As a professional science fiction writer, I've studied perception and subjectivity and language and culture, etc (but my degree is in Physical Chemistry). Read some of my novels to see if you think I have a handle on that.

Recently, research has surfaced (again) about subjectivity, and expertise. Bottom line: the more certain you are that you are correct and know exactly what you're talking about, the more likely it is that you're wrong, or not correct, or only partially correct in a special case.

It used to be a surprise that "the butler did it" -- now it's a cliche.

So in this context, if it's "difficult not to look at the employer" as noted (accurately)  for misuse of an employee, then don't look at the employer first or that's misuse of your employer's time.

Note, rather, how the phrasing of the headlines leads you to a specific interpretation of the text of the articles - and away from other interpretations.

"Late night firing..." does not constitute a crime. There's no statute against firing an employee - no statute that says what time of day you may fire an employee.  The person who suggested the firing and the person who did the firing were both entitled to fire the job holder.

All those involved held the correct titles and authority to act. No crime is sited.  It is our suspicions about motives that make us sit up straight - and our very low opinion of the persons holding the various offices make us certain there has to be some nefarious deed here and it must, absolutely must, be illegal! It just must be a crime - must. We feel that deeply.

Or put another way, it's hard to assume a person innocent until proven guilty if you hold that person in low esteem - and as you point out, finding PROOF is the difficult job.

Accusation does not imply guilt.

"Knowing" does not even hint at guilt. You must start with the crime and work up the tenuous connecting thread(s) to the culprit -- not the other way around.

Starting with the person and "investigating" them until you find some crime they must have committed is the foundation of tyranny.

Once the culture accepts "investigate the person to find the crime," two to four generations later, it seems perfectly plausible to people who never knew any other way of governing that government and law enforcement must investigate everyone to find their crimes, but since the budget won't allow that, law enforcement depends on friends and family to rat out the culprits (and the rat can lie with impunity.)  Accusation=Guilt.

So new "leaders" make so many laws or decrees that every single person is guilty of something horrendous, and the new tyrants just need to pick out their enemies and sic the investigators on them -- because everyone is guilty of something.

In those intervening decades, the kind of person, the sort of character who is attracted into a career in government or law enforcement shifts from true public servants and statesmen  to wannabe dictators with a frenetic inner compulsion to control other people's behavior.

So I pointed out that this story about an appointed paper-pusher being investigated is presented via headlines phrased to encourage the assumption that accusation=guilt. This assumption is indicating we are edging into the procedural black hole of investigating people instead of crimes.  I'm sure you can name a bunch more in the headlines who are people being investigated.
----------

So go read some current pre-election headlines, search for the connecting theme underlying the issues spotlighted, look into the shadows around the spotlight and find what you have to say on the matter.

If you need more inspiration for building a Science Fiction Romance world, check out my blog entry from May 12, 2020:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/05/theme-story-integration-part-5-how-to.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding For Fantasy Part 1 - Paranormal Detectives

Worldbuilding For Fantasy

Part 1

Paranormal Detectives

This Series on Worldbuilding for Fantasy is inspired by some very original worldbuilding in the Rivers of London Series (8 books as of 2020) by Ben Aaronovitch.  Book 7, Lies Sleeping brings together many of the mysteries we've been probing, "Love Conquers All," "Happily Ever After," and whether you need Magic or a Paranormal premise to understand Happiness?  Is Happiness supernatural?  What exactly is happiness?

One would expect building a world to house a fictional drama would be the same for Science Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Western, Historical, or Fantasy.

The process is, actually, mostly the same, at least at the beginning where the story Idea first blossoms.  The process diverges later, as you decorate with symbols, visuals, and plot-clues, foreshadowing, and then sketch out the whole rest of the world beyond the story-venue.

The most efficient way to build a world, destined for any (or all) genres, is to start by studying your audience's everyday existence, their "world" - the boundary between what they know to the point of boredom and all the "here be dragons" boundaries of their world.

Thus children's books are easy to world build for, but much-much harder to write.  You have to be careful not to talk down to children, while at the same time imparting a vision of what the next stage of their maturation is all about.

The same is actually true of adults.

The work-a-day adult actually lives in a fairly small world, associating with a few people, maybe a couple hundred, commuting the same route, shopping the same stores, grabbing fast food at the same stand-up counter.

That is changing rapidly now, as circumstances have boosted the use of work-from-home.  Working online both reduces the number of people you see daily, but increases the number you interact with.

The Romance Writer must change with the times.

Thus today's working-stiff population is trending toward having a larger view of the world, via Facebook etc., knowing what's going on in the lives of people they barely know.

Many read Romance mixed with almost anything - Victorian  Dukes, Cowboy Drifters, -- unexpectedly different but intriguing men attracted to women of strong character, driving ambition, determined to achieve a goal.

If you have a story to tell of Alien Romance -- meeting up with a VERY "different" sort of person from somewhere you've never heard of and can't imagine, Science Fiction is a natural choice.  But Fantasy, alternate-reality worlds where Magic is Real, is also a great venue to place a story of Impossible Love.

Love Conquers All.

The cliche is a cliche because it's true.

So if you want to tell the tale of an Impossible Love with a story-arc that transforms the impossible into the possible, that moves the border around your reader's life, that enlarges the known world, Paranormal Romance is a natural.

In other words, take our Real World, change something we take for granted, and build an entire world around that one difference.  And you'll have your alternate-reality where one of your characters grew up.

Now, bring that Character into the reader's reality and spur his adjustment.

This describes Gini Koch's ALIEN series,

and the feature film STARMAN - as well as THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.

Those are all technically science fiction.

What makes a World you Build into a Fantasy world?

When we insert a Paranormal element (ghost, magic, gnomes), the publishing establishment labels the result Fantasy.

But what, exactly, is Paranormal?

Google the word.
--------
par·a·nor·mal
/ˌperəˈnôrm(ə)l/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
denoting events or phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyance that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.
"a mystic who can prove he has paranormal powers"
-----

And further down the Google results, note:

---------

What is the difference between paranormal and supernatural?
The paranormal genre includes creatures like zombies, werewolves, aliens, and ghosts, as well as phenomena like telepathy and time travel. “Supernatural” refers to phenomena that are forever outside the realm of scientific explanation, such as god, the afterlife, and the soul.Jan 21, 2020

 ---------

Note how neither explanation of the word is useful to a writer attempting to craft a world that at least several publishers would buy to be published under a Paranormal or Fantasy imprint.

The vocabulary of the English language is under as much swift, drastic change as is our general lifestyle.

Wikipedia offers this modernized take on the word, Paranormal:

-----quote------
Paranormal
Description Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.

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

Note the very non-dictionary choice of wording, prejudicing the reader before the definition is offered.  "Purported" and "non-scientific" both telegraph the writer's opinion that anything called Paranormal is in fact non-existent, non-sensical, or only uneducated people would be so gullible as to think any of those things could happen.

"Popular Culture" or just "Popular" also telegraphs the writer's opinion that such ideas are beneath notice, unworthy of the educated who would never be part of "the populace."

If you, as a developing writer, haven't yet studied semantics and the semantic loading of words, do so before attempting to craft a Paranormal Novel.

If you note how "Paranormal" is used to designate movies (study the movies with that label), you'll see how the meaning of the word is warped and reshaped by common usage.

You can do that with the World you build -- you can take everyday English words and redefine them with a different emotional impact, a different semantic loading.

The most easily available laboratory for learning to do that is today's News Headlines -- almost every one you see, including CNN and Fox News, contains some word that telegraphs to the reader how to evaluate and respond to the information in the item. Become sensitive to that and you will improve your Paranormal Worldbuilding ability a hundred fold.

Another way to explore how modern publishers are re-defining vocabulary is to read novels.

I want to point you to a very popular writer who has built a complex "Paranormal" world with science fiction-detective style plots, where the detective is a Magic User and able to detect where "magic" (which is never actually defined) has been used.

The RIVERS OF LONDON series by Ben Aaronovitch (set in an alternate but not very different London) is from DAW Books -- very prominent Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher I sold a few books to when it was under previous management.

The advent of DAW publishing is a whole phenomenon all by itself - the first publisher of its kind.

Aaronovitch has painted a picture of "reality" that includes the personification of a River who can have sex with the Main Character, a Detective who can detect magic traces after the fact.

The Magic specialty division of law enforcement is after an Arch Criminal who has given them a lot of trouble, and who is building a magic artifact, a giant bell.  It's unclear what the results of letting that bell ring might be, but the indications are that it would bring an entity from another dimension that would then "rule the world" (megalomaniac style, rule).

The Rivers of London Series is a huge best seller, but is structured like an ordinary Detective Novel.  The personality of the Detective is what carries the story, but the world he lives in holds many astonishing surprises for the reader.

The science fiction overtones come from the adroit handling of some of these astonishing surprises -- just like the Characters on Star Trek, the Characters in LIES SLEEPING just take the astonishing factoids for granted.

They use their magical tools to track down and thwart the villain.

But there is a sterility to the story telling, very much like a Colombo episode, rather than anything like the Decker/Lazarus series by Faye Kellerman (that I keep reviewing here -- a series you should study for the HEA depiction).


The Main Character has a "thing" going with a female avatar of a River, but there's no conflict or story advancement there.  The plot is all about chasing the Villain, unraveling his plot, putting the kibosh on his plans to use Magic.

There is no penetrating thematic argument asserting WHY this alternate Reality is essential to the well-being of our everyday reality.  There is no actual conflict having to do with the way the Characters are embedded in their reality.

Note, by contrast, how Jim Butcher, in his Dresden Files Series, has chosen a Character who is embedded in, irked by, shaped by, challenged by, his environment.  His identity as a Wizard gives him only one way to earn a Living - basically as a consulting detective, or Paladin for Hire. His work brings him athwart the Great Powers running his world.

He is very conspicuously a Native of that alternate reality.

Ben Aaronovitch's Detective, who actually works for a government agency, officially, floats apart from his world. It doesn't shape his character, even when he takes advantage of it.  He shrugs off the bizarre reality of having shacked up with a River (I mean a real one, flowing water and all -- with an Avatar that is never explained properly).

Now Lies Sleeping is part of a Series - and if you drop into the middle here, you wouldn't expect all the explanation that went before.  But there should be more than there is.  The absence of these connecting links leaves us with an interesting Character - who floats disconnected from his reality.

Note carefully -- RIVERS OF LONDON is an international best selling series. People keep buying installments for a reason.

There might be an appetite for stories about people just coping their way through a world that is irrelevant to them.

Paranormal Fantasy lends itself easily to this sort of novel - disconnected from our reality, with Characters as disconnected from their Reality as we feel we are from today's reality.

There are a lot of "magic using detective" novels selling very well these days - and that might be because Detective Procedurals are traditionally about an objective onlooker (the Detective) prying into affairs disconnected from their personal life.

Detective novels hold particular appeal for those who want a rest from drowning in "soap opera" reality with husband, kids, cousins, clashing personalities, demanding bosses, etc.

Solving a puzzle external to the Self provides a much needed respite from Reality.

Science Fiction as a genre usually pivots around a mystery -- a scientific mystery that needs explaining by a discovery, by learning that some impossible thing is actually real.

Science Fiction is about confronting The Unknown.

Paranormal is about confronting The Unknown.

Romance is about confronting The Unknown (hence the popularity of the Arranged Marriage, or governess-marries-Duke).

And all of them are about making The Unknown into The Known.

That's what "adventure" is -- going OUT into The Unknown, and learning it so it isn't unknown any more.

The Happily Ever After state of existence is more "Unknown" than "Here Be Dragons" ever was.  It is considered completely impossible.

The Paranormal Romance writer's job is to take the Reader on an adventure into a realm where the HEA is known, Normal, attainable, but perhaps at a cost, at a risk, with every high stakes.

A Magic using Detective - using paranormal powers to pry into affairs not his own (think about Apple refusing to hack into an Apple phone belonging to a deceased terrorist), is the perfect plot-vehicle to discuss how to discover and attain the HEA.

Does it take MAGIC to understand HAPPINESS?  Or do you, as a human, need to marry a River?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Reviews 55 Walking Shadows by Faye Kellerman

Reviews 55

Walking Shadows

by

Faye Kellerman  

Reviews haven't been indexed yet.

The last few Reviews posts have discussed recent entries in long established (non-Romance) Series.  There is a reason for this focus that has to do with story structure.  It is a subtle point, and one you are not likely to learn by reading Romance genre - even series.

I have also brought Gini Koch's ALIEN series

to your attention, and though it's plot is mainly driven by a Romance that lasts right on through marriage and children, it is a hybrid genre series.  It's well done, fabulously entertaining, and a far reach outside the pure Romance genre.

Still, Romance fans love it (as do I).  The problem with trying to learn structure from the ALIEN series is simply that it is way too well done.  It's structure is buried under heaps of detail, texture, and everything-and-the-kitchen-sink plotting.

Historically, Romance genre novels did not EVER do "reprints" -- and thus were inhospitable to series writers.

To make it worthwhile to do a Series of novels, you must be able to keep reaching a wider and wider readership, while providing access to previously published novels.

Today, authors even of the SFWA Grand Master status, such as C. J. Cherryh, whose Foreigner series we discussed in Reviews 54

are providing their backlist titles as self-published or e-book only publisher items.  Kindle has been helpful for doing this.  Commercial, mainstream publishers simply can't do it because of the tax laws (which derailed many writers' careers) taxing warehouse inventory.

To drive a Series of novels to a satisfying and memorable conclusion, to the kind of payoff for reading so many books that makes the money-time-effort-attention worth while, a writer needs constant, continuous, reprint or availability of previous entries in the series.

The world has changed to where e-books can do this job.

During this shift, Romance genre, propelled by a handful of adventurous editors, managed to introduce Romance readers to that big-bang payoff that only a well crafted, long running (15 books or more), can deliver.

Because of ineptitude of series structure (it does take practice!), many series peter out instead of delivering that one, final, definitive bang that flings the Happily Ever After future right out before the reader's eyes.

It took Romance a while to grasp what Science Fiction had been doing for a couple of decades, and now I think we are seeing a transformation of the Romance field that will shift the views of the general public about the real-life possibility of the HEA.

Faye Kellerman (wife of the world famous Jonathan Kellerman, master of the Mystery Genre series), burst onto the publishing scene with a spectacularly different Mystery/Romance hybrid, Ritual Bath.  That novel won awards in spite of being far outside the bounds of what Mystery editors were looking for from a new writer.

The Ritual Bath,

the first in this long (so far 26 novels in the Decker/Lazarus series), introduced the Detective (Decker) to a witness to a murder (Rina Lazarus, a widow with 2 boys), they fall in love and over the course of 26 (so far) novels, Decker returns to his Jewish/religious roots because Rina is very observant (and may as well be an Alien From Outer Space from Decker's point of view), and they get married, have a kid, adopt kids (sort of) raise kids, send them off to college and marriage, move from one neighborhood to another, then retire to a different state, while Decker's daughter by a previous marriage is now a police Detective, too, and a valuable contact in another city.

Here is a list of the 26 novels:
https://amazon.com/gp/product/B07XX9XPGW

Meanwhile, Decker continues his career as a police Detective, retires to detect in a small town, and keeps on stumbling over stumper cases.

Rina, as always, sticks her nose in where it doesn't belong and solves a few of his cases, here and there (sometimes becoming a target of a murderer), drags him into her family's life, and generally is a stalwart, heroic woman.

Walking Shadows is #25 in this series, and #26 is Lost Boys, to be released in October 2020.

I have always given my highest (10 out of 5 Stars!!!) to the Decker/Lazarus series because it is one of the earliest examples of triple hybridization in publishing and broke ground for the mixed genre concept.

Isaac Asimov did lay the foundation with his Black Widow science fiction mysteries, and other writers have woven Paranormal elements into Detective novels, and fantasy worlds.  It took decades to achieve the conditions favorable to the Decker/Lazarus concept -- Mystery structure, Romance, and Religion.

Since fans seemed to object, the Religion elements get submerged in the later books, dissipated under the Mystery, and Romance per se does not burgeon into a big part of their family life.  It might have been more interesting to me if Rina had taken up the profession of the Match Maker, thus keeping Romance a hot element in each novel, while mixing it with Religion.  Also I'd have loved to see more novels drawing them into the religious life of other religions -- Los Angeles, the setting for most of the novels, certainly has enough variegated Religions.

My point is not that Religion is the important topic, but rather that the carefully balanced blend of all 3 genres in the initial novel, Ritual Bath, became distorted.

This happened because of reader feedback and editorial pressure, I'm sure (though I have no first hand knowledge).

The series is structured by the Life Cycle of the typical second-marriage couple, and that Life Cycle is optimized for a hard-working Los Angeles Detective (Vice squad to Homicide) by the addition of the third leg of Romance's footstool, Religion.

Rina Lazarus and Peter Decker are Soul Mates. That just glows out of the first novel in the series, they meet and parks fly.  It is intense, and artistically juxtaposed to murder.

They take several years to arrange life into marriage-and-a-kid.

That is how real life usually structures.

Compressing a life-cycle pivot point series into ONE novel spanning just a few weeks or months (or less) from First Sight to Wedding Bells reduces the real-life-cycle of actually lived events to a Comic Book.

It is a child's view of reality, of adulthood.

And that could be why so many people just can't accept the idea that there can exist such a thing as a couple "living happily ever after."

It's a childish view of adulthood, to them, and offering any single Romance genre novel as an example of how it is real just repels them more strongly.

Living life takes time.

Children just don't experience time the way adults do.

To a child, every endeavor is a one-step-process.  "Let's go to the park," says the child, and expects to drag Mom out the door.  But Mom first has to clean up breakfast, take dinner out of the freezer, answer the phone, go to the bathroom, change the kid's clothes, set the clothes washer going, pack toys and food for the kid, THEN go out the door, get into the car - oh, and on the way to the park, stop for gas, drop off the dry cleaning, and then head for the park, look for a parking spot, -- and by the time they are traipsing across the park, the kid has to go to the bathroom.  Go to the park is a multi-step procedure, and none of the regular parts of life can be neglected when you add Park to the list.

From the child's perspective, all that excess stuff is irrelevant.

Perspective may be the reason some people just can't grasp the reality of the HEA.  To progress from where that reader is to where the HEA is real is a multi-step procedure that includes many routine life-tasks plus a few special preparations, and requires some delayed gratification, some self-discipline, some heavy lifting, and long-tedious journeys between.

To the child who wants to go to the Park, getting there isn't real until he's swooping down the slides, deviling other kids on the playground, feeding the ducks, and fighting for a spot on the swings.

The child who has been to the Park before has building expectations, knowing there really is a Park, but it just isn't here right now.

The adult reading a Romance doesn't know there is an HEA, and has no idea what the connection is between this time-consuming, tedious, Romance, and the HEA.  Just as the child doesn't see the point of taking dinner out of the freezer before leaving, then stopping on errands along the way, the adult reading a Romance may not see the point of Romance.

Today's culture encourages people to confuse Romance with sex -- and that's another discussion.

There was a time when no publisher would publish a Romance novel that had even one sex scene.  Think about that.

In real life, Relationships are built over years, even decades. What a person means to you is the summation of thousands of interactions, of challenges met together, of favors done, of achievements admired, of movies watched together, and even children raised together.

Today, we are more keenly aware of what other people mean to us because of the sharp, sudden, unexpected loss of loved ones, co-workers, friends, distant relatives, neighbors, due to the Covid-19 virus, or due to lack of available treatment for a condition because of the focus on Covid-19.

People grow roots into each others' guts.  Loss of such a closely rooted person is like a tree falling over in a storm, leaving root system jutting into the air.  It's a ripping hurt.

A single novel, even a big, thick one spanning years of time, can't depict the growth of such a root system between people.

It takes a Series, maybe like the Decker/Lazarus series, spanning decades, to grow the Character's roots into the guts of the reader. To understand what the Characters mean to each other, the reader has to live their life parallel to that character.  It might take a week or two to read a long novel - and that just isn't long enough to feel, to believe, the evolutionary change of maturity the Characters have to go through between First Sight and HEA.

Ritual Bath was first published in 1986. I think it was 1992 that I first discovered a paperback of it at a book store.  It's 2020, and I can barely wait for the next installment!

Decker and Lazarus, Peter and Rina, are living the HEA - the real-life-kind of HEA, full of growth, change, challenge, and the application of the lessons learned at First Sight to the deeply entwined roots into each others' Souls.

If you want to argue the HEA with your readers, plan a long series, and be certain it has a firm structure built from the autobiographical bones of real people's real lives.  Then flesh out those bones with variations that bespeak the underlying themes you are dealing with.

Each individual novel in the Series has to open, and explicate, some sub-theme that is derived from that main envelope theme.

Note how C. J. Cherryh, in her Foreigner Series, treats the material of a single novel - an Event, a Problem, and the Solution - all focused around a theme - as a trilogy.  There is an overall theme to the series, and a sub-theme illustrated in each trilogy.

The series is structured around the life, and life-cycle, of Bren Cameron -- who is a father-figure to the young Atevi prince.

Bren stumbles from crisis to crisis -- yet he is living the HEA many readers say doesn't exist.

Think about that.  What is your vision of an HEA?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World Part 25 - Understanding the Shifting Fiction Market

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World

Part 25

Understanding the Shifting Fiction Market 

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous entries in Marketing Fiction in a Changing World are indexed here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

We have discussed issues of "Marketing" (a whole profession independent writers have to master) and we have discussed the nature of FICTION (storytelling) in mechanical detail and as an Art Form.  Under the topics related to Theme, we have discussed the everyday world your readers live in and what that has to do with their taste in fiction.

We have looked at these various topics as fairly static in time.  They are not static.  But to grasp the nature and shape of the way they change with time, a writer must first see the static flash-photograph.

If you've got that set of static images in your mind, now is a good time to start animating it.

The world is changing.

Science Fiction can be about the past, the present or the future, and so can science fiction romance or Paranormal Romance.

In fact the most interesting novels, and classics in the making, tend to involve glimpses of how the far past, the intermediate past, and the present combine to generate the future -- how a timeline is all connected.

To create this animated vision for your readers you need to do a lot of detailed worldbuilding that does not appear in your story, and that your characters (and readers) know nothing about.

The world you build for your Characters has to be more internally consistent than our everyday real world.  You achieve that by focusing on a singular Theme, or for a series, a Theme Bundle (set of related statements about reality which can be disproved by refuting any one of them.)

Science Fiction and Science Fiction Romance are genres that feature "science" foremost.  Today, that has translated into "technology."

Star Trek featured the technology of the future by naming devices by their function -- "Phaser" or "Transporter."  We use technology to create tools to do things so we can free up our capacity to do other things.

We, as a world, are in the process of leaping across a technological chasm even the writers of Star Trek could not envision.  In fact, some argue, the advent of that TV Series did a lot to spur the creation of the present world's technology (such as computers, the internet and even the Web).

Today, those who grew up since 1990 have coined the term "inter-web" because they don't have a clue what the difference is between the internet and the web.  They have no idea where the concept "browser" came from or how that concept changed everything about how we use computers -- and now mobile devices more powerful than desktops built in the year 2000.

And change is not "done" yet -- the pace is increasing toward self-driving cars and even autonomous cars.  Everyone I know wants a household robot to act as personal maid, butler, footman, gardener -- all by one walking device.

The flying car is furiously being invented.

We think of these things as the forces that will shape the future, and the readers now growing up on currently published fiction (and Netflix Originals streaming).

But as science fiction writers we have to consider an even larger, more stealthy force, and what that force might yet do to the way our future readers will live.

That force that must be factored into the swirling and conflicting forces producing A.I. and autonomous transportation (there go the truck driver jobs, and ALL the Romances about falling in love with a truck driver).

The entire "Internet of Things" or IoT is a bigger force for the change in the way we see the world and interact with each other, most importantly the way we govern ourselves -- maybe even for Religion as part of the social order.

http://www.nature.com/news/the-internet-of-things-comes-to-the-lab-1.21383?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews  

The IoT is all about your connected Thermostat, household Security cameras and motion detectors, taking care of your kids who are at home while you are at work by being able to see them on your phone and talk over loudspeakers into your home -- being able to track their phones, knowing where your car is at every moment, how fast it is traveling, whether it did an illegal turn.  "Things" will come to include dishwshers, clothes washers, maybe clothes themselves which will tattle on you when you don't exercise enough.

On the one hand, IoT gives you command of many functions with very little effort (other than upgrade-hell and being hacked).

On the other hand, Privacy is a thing of the past.  Already government is claiming rights over your phone's contents.  How many generations until government wins the point because nobody is alive who remembers what it is to "be alone."

We use "baby monitors" to be sure our infant is still breathing.  How many generations until every breath you take your whole life long can become a matter of public record if someone doesn't like something else you did?

The key to understanding human behavior for the purposes of writing science fiction is to understand that the most powerful human survival trait is adaptability.

Even animals do not have the adaptability that humans have.

We are seeing animal species adapt to city life, or life in cages, and lose the ability to survive in "the wild" where the species would ordinarily live.  They are even adapting to a poisoned environment.

Life is adaptable -- but it generations and a lot of death.

Humans can adapt faster.  Not being instinct driven, we produce in each generation a few who can and do think the unthinkable and do the impossible, redefining parameters for the next generation.

But just like animals, we lose previously perfected survival skills.  How many of us city dwellers could walk across a continent without trails, paths or roads, without water fountains and motels?  Who among us is fit to go where no man has gone before?

Yet, humanity does keep producing that sort of person -- and many today are persisting in acquiring basic skills like metal working, quilt making, weaving.

Meanwhile, tides of everyday experience are sweeping toward the computer driven, artificial intelligence, world.

Sneaking up on us from the depths of that world is the tsunami of what is now called Big Data.

As noted  previously
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/04/theme-archetype-integration-part-5.html
all our governments, on whichever governing theory you choose, have for centuries been making decisions based on "statistics."

Statistics does not "work backwards."  You can accurately predict the behavior of a large group of people, but you can not discover anything at all about a single member of that group.

In other words, all "prejudice" that we take for granted today, is rooted in a false premise.

1. The Super Rich Do A Lot of Harm
2. Dick is Super Rich
3. Therefore Dick Does A Lot Of Harm

That's a false paradigm, not because of Dick's individual traits, but because it attempts to work statistics backwards -- to infer something about an individual member of a group by attributing a proven trait of the group to an individual member of the group.

Statistics will work well to govern nations provided the governors of the nations are willing to mash, slaughter, violate, and even annihilate pockets of individuals.

The stealth trend that science fiction writers trying to write "classics" that will be readable in the future (worth reprinting) originates at the junction of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence.

Even today, the entire premise of Statistics as a governing tool is being discarded.  So far, we don't exactly have anything to replace it, so a writer trying to portray life 50 years from now has to guess what will replace Statistics.

The current scientific guess is Big Data.

To write science fiction, you can choose a Theme based on "Big Data Will Solve All Human Problems" -- e.g. no more poverty, drug addiction, murderous rage, road rage, sexual jealousy.

Or you can choose to write about the next huge shift, and choose a Conflict rooted in the crusade to replace Big Data and restore Privacy by discovering a new principle on which to govern humanity.

Or perhaps you might choose a premise based on genetically altering humanity to erase the combative tendency?

None of those choices would necessarily show up in your Characters, their Conflicts, or the Resolution of those conflicts.  It would be nothing but background.  If a character wanted to travel from one person's living room to another person's back yard for a barbecue, they might summon an A.I. driven Uber car -- or just step through a "door" projected by their pocket device? Or projected by a brain implant.

Whatever changes you depict as the way your Characters live and procreate, they may seem ridiculous to future readers -- or spookily prescient.

Mostly, science fiction writers working in their "near future" write "cautionary tales" -- depicting a world they really do not want to see realized.

We are currently living in such a world - predicted very accurately in the 1940's and 1950's science fiction novels.  But while predicting much of the difficulties we are dealing with (including global warming), they fail utterly to envision anything like the World Wide Web, or Web commerce.

This absence of smartphones and web commerce affects how a Scene can be framed, what the annoying difficulties a character faces are, and how quickly and efficiently they can discover facts.  Nobody predicted Google in your pocket!  Or Twitter and flashmobs.

A good place to begin thinking about where we are now, as opposed to where we were 50 years ago, and thus where we will be in 50 years from now (when your books will be reprinted if they are classics), is to watch some old movies.

Netflix will surface some of the great ones.  Check Amazon Prime video for old TV Shows.

Then read some of the novels popular at those times.  Science Fiction is not really the best field to read to nail a historical point to extrapolate from.

Romances written 50 years ago as "Contemporary" will give you a lot of information about how the world seemed, but you tend to get a lot of gut-churning cultural static embedded in old Contemporary Romance.  Women had a different self-image at that time, and taught their daughters a different self image (more child-like, to prepare for a life of dependence and perpetual pregnancy).

Humans are adaptable, and women have (since cave dwelling days) adapted to being the victims of their physiology.  Science has produced tools to get a handle on those problems (and we're still arguing over how to use those tools without abusing the power they bestow), and that has changed the world.

So reading old Contemporary Romance is good for learning how vastly birth control has changed the world, but the study is hard on a modern-adapted psyche.  Historical Romance set in the 1950's (or 1800's Europe) written today generally puts a female character with today's attitudes into that old world -- and thus loses verisimilitude.

Do a contrast/compare study between Contemporary Romance written in 1950's and Historical Romance written today but set in the 1950's.

You will see why, when setting your Science Fiction Romance in the future, you must change the Character's self-image to be a product of their time, not ours.

Today's kids, growing up with a phone in their pocket, are going to have a different self-image -- about what they can do, or not do, what they want to do or refuse to do, and whether or not anyone will ever know what they did.

That attitude shift about Privacy will definitely affect how you can plot a Mystery Novel.

Remember how often I've mentioned that Science Fiction writers often moonlight as Mystery writers (or Western writers) because the fields are the same -- and most science fiction readers also read Mystery and Westerns.

Mystery is allied with the 'science' aspects of science fiction and Westerns are allied with the "where no man has gone before" exploration of outer space, meeting Aliens (Indians), dimensions of science fiction.

Here is a very old Mystery series that depicts and reveals the contemporary world of the 1960's (a famous period of social change well captured here).

The Rabbi Small Novels[edit]
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late – 1964
Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry – 1966
Sunday, the Rabbi Stayed Home – 1969
Monday The Rabbi Took Off – 1972
Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red – 1973
Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet – 1976
Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out – 1978
Conversations with Rabbi Small – 1981
Someday the Rabbi Will Leave – 1985
One Fine Day the Rabbi Bought a Cross – 1987
The Day the Rabbi Resigned – 1992
That Day the Rabbi Left Town – 1996

There are by the famous (then) best selling mystery writer Harry Kemelman, and here is his wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Kemelman

Read a few of these.  They are in Kindle and very cheap and easy to find (that old Internet Commerce change.)

In the 1960's people had to spend hours and hours in libraries, try to order books via inter-library loan, only to discover they were no longer available.

Revel in today's fingertip availability - understand what it means to the world view and self-image of the current teens.

Pick a few Historic points, draw the line connecting them and extrapolate that line into the future of 50 years from now.  How will Romance happen?  How will people meet each other?  Will "dating sites" turn into something more in the world of Big Data and lack of privacy?  Will marriages always work when arranged by a particular site?

Will a proprietary algorithm be hoarded by that particular dating site?  Will courts demand they give it away so everyone can benefit?

Will government take over dating sites and provide that free service as part of your health-care rights (after all a bad marriage can drive you crazy and stress your body to where you die young!)

What sort of ways will people find to do murder, and what tools will detectives of that future use to uncover the dastardly deed?

Isaac Asimov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov
 wrote the Black Widdow science fiction mysteries that were extremely popular, and Randall Garrett created the Lord Darcy character, a detective who used Magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Darcy_(character)

All science is detective work.  And it can be argued that all Romance is detective work - one must "detect" what is motivating the potential spouse.  "What does she see in him?" is the key question.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

The answer changes with time and the depth and breadth of knowledge of the other person's behavior.

If you can develop and unfold a Relationship for your readers, you can develop and unfold an entire world for those readers.  The skills are the same, but the material differs.

Watch some old TV, and read some old books, then observe how you solve problems today -- a leaky roof, a car that won't start, a subway train that's late, an internet connection that does not work, a store that's out of a critical item.

What mysteries have you solved today?  Watch your mind problem-solve, and what tools you reach for without thinking, -- then see how your future self will target these problems 50 years from now.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Suspension of Disbelief

I recently read SIRE AND DAMN, the latest (I hope not the last, but I fear it may be) "Dog Lover's Mystery" by Susan Conant. It started me thinking about the conventional but "unrealistic" elements mystery authors have an implicit agreement with readers to treat as believable, similar to the theatrical convention that actors can speak "aside" to the audience without being heard by any other characters onstage.

Most obvious is the convention that makes amateur detective series possible at all. We have to accept as normal that a hero or heroine not involved in law enforcement, an investigative profession, or the criminal underworld encounters dozens of murders in his or her daily life. It's the phenomenon that gives the small Maine town in the TV show MURDER SHE WROTE a higher per-capita homicide rate than Baltimore or Washington. Sometimes the author offers a sort-of rationale for the protagonist's repeated clashes with violent death. Walter Mosley's series protagonist Easy Rawlins, a black man in post-World-War-II southern California, builds a reputation in his community for solving problems people don't trust the police to deal with. Similarly, Barbara Hambly's "free man of color" in antebellum New Orleans, Benjamin January, after unraveling a few mysteries in which he accidentally gets entangled, becomes the person his friends and acquaintances—black, white, and mixed-race—turn to when delicate problems arise. Most "cozy" mystery series, though, simply ask the reader to accept the premise that a chef, a writer, or (as in Susan Conant's series) a dog trainer will trip over a murder or two every few months.

Likewise, we expect the murderer to be revealed as a member of the heroine's circle of acquaintances, not someone from out in left field she's never met. In the classic tradition established by such authors as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, pinning the crime on a character not included in the roster of suspects would be considered unfair to the reader.

The more hard-boiled varieties of murder mysteries, the kind with a higher level of onstage violence, feature another "unrealistic" convention: The hero or heroine usually gets knocked unconscious at least once per book. Yet he or she recovers (sometimes after a credible period of recuperation, sometimes "unrealistically" fast) and soldiers on through adventure after adventure with no sign of permanent brain damage. Given all the recent media publicity about the dangers of concussions (in children's athletic programs, for instance), we have to accept the hero's phenomenal toughness and good luck as part of our genre expectations.

More often than chance would predict, early in the story the protagonist comes across just the bit of specialized or confidential information that she'll later need to solve the case. This example seems to me a borderline case; the effectiveness of suspension of disbelief depends on the author's skill in planting the information in the natural flow of the action. It stretches the bounds of credibility, however, when the amateur detective just happens to overhear a fragment of dialogue that conveys the vital piece of missing information. There was a TV series about a crime-solving priest and nun that, although it was lots of fun, did that kind of thing too often. One of Elizabeth Peters's suspense novels satirizes this device when the heroine sneaks into the villains' lair and eavesdrops on them, lamenting that nobody conveniently says something like, "I will now go to the dungeon and check on our prisoner, who is in the third cell on the right."

In general, any reliance on coincidence to solve the mystery is problematic; an author might be allowed one such incident every now and then, but a little bit of coincidence goes a long way. There can be a fine line between disbelief being suspended and (as Marion Zimmer Bradley used to say) hanged by the neck until dead.

Then there's the direct opposite, Tolkien's "secondary belief," when an author draws the reader so deeply into a fictional world that it comes to life for us. No "suspension" is needed, because we experience the secondary world as a realm that could truly exist on a different plane of reality.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Guest Post by Deborah Macgillivray - Wolf In Wolf's Clothing

Here below is a Guest Post by a writer whose book I reviewed here a while ago, and still remember.  It's not just memorable, it's vivid and wonderful!  Here's the post where I discuss that novel:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html 

And this is about the Dorchester publishing bankruptcy and how it affects writers.  And what writers are doing about it.  See official notice from SFWA posted at end of this blog post. 

You really must read Macgillivray.  It's not just good entertainment.  It's informative, instructive, illustrative of good writing, and inspiring too. 

I'm thrilled to bring you this story in her own words, and I want you to pay close attention, most especially if you are intending to embark on a career in ficton writing. 

Here's where to find a list of Deborah's books that are currently available in Kindle:

Deborah Macgillivray

-----------Guest Post from Deborah Macgillivray -----------

Life does imitate art―

© By Deborah Macgillivray

Oscar Wilde said in his 1889 essay, The Decay of Lying, that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life".  You might say I am living proof of that.  At the very end of 2009, just days before Christmas, I thought the most urgent and important thing in my life was meeting the deadlines for my next two books.  At eight in the evening, I had typed “the end” to my next historical novel, fourth in the Dragons of Challon™ series― Redemption ― and was going over notes to finish the fourth in the Sisters of Colford Hall ™ series― To Bell The Vampire. 

I had been pulling all-nighters, overdosing on 5 Hour Energy for days to get the book finished.  I felt happy with the novel, so I treated myself to what I hadn’t indulged in too much that week―sleep.  I slept so well!  I cannot ever recall resting as peacefully as I did for those few hours from 8:30 pm until 1:21 am.  Sometimes, people jokingly remark that is sleeping the sleep of the dead.  I came very close to that being reality.

I jerked from that velvet sleep at the wee hour of the morn, knowing something was wrong.  The lights were out.  I had fallen asleep with the television going, so there should have been that soft illumination filling the room.  But there was nothing.  I never awaken easily, so I nearly tumbled out of bed trying to feel my way to the light on the nightstand.  When I did, I saw something very strange.  The room was black, like a thick woolen curtain, yet a bright orange glow showed toward the bottom six inches.  That was the first inkling that I was in dire trouble. 

Drawing a breath I sucked in oily black smoke.  I had not been aware of that fact before, because I by chance had been sleeping with a pillow on my head.  I had been suffering an ear ache, and sleeping with the pillow over my head made it hurt less.  Through the heavy befuddlement of my still sleepy brain, I recalled a fire safety tip, which said to get to the floor level because there was still good air down low.  Good tip, but one that was unworkable for me.  I knew if I went down on my knees I might not come out of this alive.  I had knee surgery in May and it hadn’t healed right.  Dropping to my knees and crawling would have been sealing my death.

I fumbled around for the phone in the bedroom.  It was dead.  So holding my breath, I staggered toward the other end of the house.  It was then I first saw the fire―a massive orange monster that had already engulfed one whole wall of the house and was going up through the roof.  It’s hard to think when you are faced by a horror like that.  Damn dangerous not to!!!  I had to go past the flames to get to the kitchen where the wall phone was.  Skirting the spreading fire, I reached the darkened room.  Stupidly, I wasted precious seconds thinking I could throw some water on the flames to slow it down, with the hopes of holding things at bay until the fire department came.  Only, there was no water coming out.  I burned one hand on the faucet when I tried to turn it on.  The bloody faucet was like touching a brand.  It just gurgled and hissed steam!  I reeled to the phone to call for help, but that phone was dead as well.  What I didn’t know―the phone lines had already burnt through on the outer wall.

 I saw I had made a bad mistake in wasting the time coming to this end of the house.  The fire was running along the center of the ceiling in the porch room.  As it shot across the roof and ceiling, liquid fire was raining down on the carpet and the woolen carpeting was going up like tissue paper!  Our front door was on the To Do List for repair.  Recently, it had become swollen from so much rain and needed planing because it kept sticking, seeing it impossible to get open.  There was no way I could go out through that entrance.  The only avenue left would see me walk through the fire, back the way I had come, to reach the rear door.  The sliding glass doors on the side were already engulfed in the writhing flames.  I stared in horror as I saw the glass beginning to melt and buckle, heard the pinging of the metal frame starting to warp.  Within seconds I would have been trapped. 

It was a very bizarre moment.  I was still fuzzy-headed from just waking up and the sheer enormity of all this happening about me was simply too much for my mind to take in.  Worse, I thought for a few heartbeats that surely I was sleeping still, dreaming about my last book A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing, and I would awaken and laugh at the silly nightmare of getting trapped inside one’s own book.  The final scene in my novel had dealt with a thatched house going up in flames and with the heroine trapped inside, what she did to survive.  How utterly bizarre, that a book just released in October should be a reflection of my life in December!  So much of what I had written for that book echoed what I was now living through.  Talk about eerie, almost prophetic!

I watched as the fire on the carpet rose to chest level.  I have very long hair, and I was concerned the flames raining down would set it afire.  But at that point, I had no alternative, no hope of surviving this unless I moved.  My lungs were already crying out, desperate for air, but I couldn’t suck in that foul black smoke.  I never knew smoke could be so black, or the heat from the flames could almost shrivel your skin like drying leather.  The scents, the sights, the feel will never leave me.  To this day, I have problems being in a totally black room, or to smell the scent of someone burning a fire in a fireplace.

Finally, I went forward into the crucible, taking the twenty foot long room in jumps, just praying I would be going too fast for the flames to catch me, praying that bad knee didn’t buckle and send me crashing down into the room of fire.   I was lucky.  I did reach the outside, and the injuries were small compared to what could have happened.  Some smoke in my lungs, a burned hand.  Only, my two cats were still inside.  I couldn’t reach them from that side of the house, so I went around to the front, trying to see if I could get in through a window to find them.   All windows now had flames coming from them.  The only hope was to try and dig a hole through the wall.  I took a long piece of metal and broke off the wooden siding, trying to dig through the insulation, beaver board and a brick wall on the inside. 

A couple, who had just gotten married and was coming back from celebrating, were passing by and saw the flames.  They called the fire department.  The firemen came with engine lights flashing and, sirens wailing, but it was too late.  In those few minutes, from the time I had awoken until the newlyweds passing pulled me from the hole in the wall, where I was trying to reach my kitties, my whole life went up in a conflagration.  There was absolutely nothing left.

My identification was gone.  Fortunately, my husband had been away and was coming home that night or his license, credit cards and checks would have been lost, too, complicating what I had to face in the coming days.  I was in shock, naturally.  Everything was gone!  My manuscripts, my computers, my clothing.  I had run into the cold night with the clothes on my back and barefooted.  I laughed it was lucky I had fallen asleep in my jeans and a sweater that night, or I would have been running around in a nightgown!

Currently, I am still working to rebuild my life, to heal from this devastation.  It has taken time to settle the past and embrace the future.  A new home, new computers…a new life.  With all that going on, my writing has had to take second place.  The two novels were lost.  Oh, I had copies on external hard drives―which melted along with the laptops.  I have since learned to use Carbonite, so all my writing is now backed up online. 

During all this, you learn new priorities and your perspectives change.  Things that were so important suddenly took a backseat to the healing, adjusting and rebuilding my life.  As soon as my days would return to something that resembled normal, another tragedy hit me in my husband nearly died in the following year. 

He began experiencing grave seizures that saw him in ICU for weeks, not expected to live.   Fortunately, and with good care, he did.  Then, we faced a long hospitalization and rehab for him to learn to walk again.  Once more, things came around and I thought the troubles were behind me.  Yet again, I faced one of those situations that test your strength when my husband faced losing vision in his right eye.  After five months of laser treatments we are hopeful in time his vision will be all right.

I suppose that is why when news of Dorchester Publishing going bankrupt was announced it hardly seemed more than a bump in the road to me.  Before the fire I would have been devastated that one of my publishers was going out-of-business.  Dorchester left hundreds of authors “orphaned”― worse, left those writers without paying them for years.  The news hit many authors with a devastating impact.  I truly enjoyed writing the Sisters of Colford Hall series, and knew my editor, Chris Keeslar, “got” my quirky stories of the women who found love better the second time around.  I would miss working with him.  I had a total of eight books in the series planned and in production.  Three were out.  What would happen now?

Well, once more, things are coming around.  My husband’s health is stable.  I have healed―mostly.  There are times when I see a fire portrayed in a movie or television that I have to walk away or close my eyes against the images, fighting not to be sucked back into the moment that nearly claimed my life.  As I said, I cannot take being in a darkened room, and no longer enjoy the scent of a wood fire. 

And, my writing is coming around.  There is a new future for the Sisters series.  Amazon Publishing/Montlake has given me an offer to see the first three books put into Kindle, Tradesize and Hardback.  So, if I accept their contract, they will fix some of the wrongs done by Dorchester and give my Montgomerie sisters a new home.

I still look at the words I wrote in A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing.  The scenes bring a chill to my spine, just how closely they mirrored what happened to me.  I don’t know what prompted Mr. Wilde to pen that phrase about life imitating art, but I know he was quite right―it does.

-----------END GUEST POST --------------

Now that is a snatch of real life in the business of Publishing. 

OK, not everyone has a house fire hit along with dire illness and a publisher's bankruptcy all at once, but "life" gets in the way of "writing" one way or another. 

I haven't done Deborah's natal chart, so I don't know the facts in her case or her husband's -- BUT -- this triple-disaster syndrome is typical of Pluto transits to sensitized natal points, and those kinds of disasters -- dire and terrible BLOWS to life's stability coming in a series stretched over several years, creating a "new normal" if you survive -- are typical Pluto effects at the pinnacle of success.  It's the same energy that manifests as success and DIRE BLOWS.  Knowing that fact in a very instinctive way makes a writer truly great, but only if you survive the blows.  That is why I've discussed Pluto in such depth in previous posts on this blog. 

If you do survive it, the knowledge informs your next novel.  Disasters would have happened, even if you were doing something else for a living, but you wouldn't have developed the skills to use that experience in a novel, to share it, to help others survive their blows. 

The thing is, the publishing business is a business, and does not care or compensate for the Events of a writer's life. 

The writer has to keep going through all that, pick up on the other side and go on producing words. 

My point here is that one does not "become" a writer.  One is, or is not, "a writer."  Writing is what you can't help doing no matter what's going on.  Selling what you write, that's a totally different matter.

There will be more twists and turns to the Dorchester saga and the fates of the writers with contracts with Dorchester.  A PART 2 for Deborah's saga as events develop with this new venue should be forthcoming in a few months. 

But I'm telling you straight, if you are planning "to become a writer," think again -- and again.

You just don't "become" a writer -- you discover that you "are" a writer, and can't help it. 

--------------October 14, 2012 QUOTE ----------------
THIS VIA AN OFFICIAL SFWA MAILING TO WRITERS:

Because of severe problems with rights and payments, Dorchester Books was placed on probation in December 2010.  By January 2012, it was clear that the company was on the verge of going out of business, and they soon fired most of their staff.  The company managed to avoid bankruptcy, however, and remained in control of it's contracts with writers.
 Earlier this year, Amazon Publishing purchased the contracts for well over 1,000 Dorchester books.  Dorchester authors were offered the chance to join Amazon Publishing and receive full back royalties or have their rights reverted.  Amazon reported that a potential 1,900 titles were involved, and that 225 authors had turned down the offers and asked for their rights back.
 Amazon/Dorchester reports on their Web site:

 "At this time, we are completing the reversion process, transferring all titles back to their respective authors. Though we have made great strides, our research has uncovered a number of authors for whom we have no contact information. In addition, there are a number of titles without corresponding authors. To complete this reversion process, we will need your help."
 There is a form on the site for authors to use to reclaim rights: http://www.dorchesterpub.com

--------------END QUOTE-------------

So, after you've begun selling Science Fiction or Fantasy to markets that pay advances, you should seriously consider joining various writer organizations such as sfwa.org and/or http://www.epicorg.com/index.php 



Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Beauty and the Beast: Constructing the HEA

To some people it may seem somewhat narrow minded that readers of Romance insist on the Happily Ever After ending.

After all, HEA is so unrealistic, a childish fantasy. Thus people who read Romance must have something wrong with them, which means Romance as a field is not to be taken seriously, which is a topic we've discussed at length in this blog.

I think those readers are missing something important about the novel as an artform. As writers, our job is to explain what they're missing in "show don't tell" technique.

Whatever type of novel you prefer reading, you read it for the satisfaction, the validation of your world view in the artform.

The Romance as an artform is not different, even (or especially) when you cast the Romance plot against an alien background or involve a non-human character in the main plot thread.

The worldview that the Romance HEA validates is something like "No Man Is An Island" or in modern psychological research, that happier, healthier longer lives are lived by those who have firm and dependable Relationships.

Here's a recent report in a long list of such reports on marriage and health:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-heart-women5-2009mar05,0,5692637.story?track=rss
--------------
Reuters
March 5, 2009
Chicago -- Women in strained marriages are more likely than other wives to have high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease, researchers said today.
... and: The researchers found that women in marriages with high levels of strife were more prone to depression and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms including thick waist, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and abnormal blood sugar that significantly raise the risk of heart disease.
---------------

Oh? HEA is unrealistic, eh?

If a relationship crystallizes solidly, settles into a supportive and low-strife paradigm, then (science is beginning to discover) AS A CONSEQUENCE the future course of the partners lives will be ENHANCED by good health and an assortment of miseries that are absent. That is they will live "happily ever after" because of the formation of this Relationship.

There have been other studies that showed how women are physically healthier than men because of the maintaining of relationships with other women, particularly that of the confidant. Relationships cause consequences -- and good Relationships cause HEA.

Of course, humans being human, while you're living an HEA arc of a life, you will find other reasons to make yourself miserable. You never think of all the diseases and disorders and dysfunctions you DON'T have in your life, so you can't see that you are happy.

People who have this kind of very real misery in their life might want to read horror or tragedy -- soap opera stories of unrelenting misery -- to stay aware of the troubles they don't have, troubles worse than theirs. It's a way of convincing yourself you are happy. And there's nothing wrong with that. It can motivate changes in relationships to raise the odds of an HEA in life. HEA endings can do that too - spark aspiration.

So how does a writer construct an HEA ending?

Well, it's an ENDING.

There are 3 points in The Novel that have to be nailed before you can outline the novel. Beginning. Middle. End. Determine any one of those, and the other two become determined.

If the END must be "happy" - an up-beat ending - then the MIDDLE must be the worst point in the main character's life (utter ruin; total hopelessness; conquered, captured, vanquished, left for dead, stood up at the altar).

With a low Middle and high End -- the Beginning has to be the ORIGIN of the problem that nearly kills the main character in the Middle and which he overcomes to triumph in the end.

Solve this one problem and all his life-troubles are over for good. There's HEA potential in every other genre, even or especially Horror.

Plot is driven by Conflict. To have a conflict, you have to have at least two elements that conflict. This vs. That. An urgent MUST vs an equally formidable CAN'T.

In the Romance, the urgent MUST is provided by the attraction to the other party. Science has revealed why we feel that MUST.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090211/ap_on_sc/sci_love_science

is an article on discoveries about brain chemistry and love. I think I've mentioned that here before, and on goodreads.com in SFRomance.

Add to that the subliminal awareness that our very lives depend on founding solid Relationships, and when a candidate for that Relationship appears it becomes an urgent emergency to "catch" that guy or gal.

Theory has it that it's the reproductive urge that drives us into Relationships. And that certainly seems reasonable -- BUT, if you don't live long enough to have and raise kids, reproduction becomes a moot point. I think we are aware in every cell of our bodies that our minute to minute existence depends on solid Relationships.

Mystically, the First Chakra (staying alive) always trumps the Second Chakra matters of reproduction. Our priorities are ordered for us on that basic a level. This premise lurks far in the background of my Sime~Gen novels.




The brain chemistry study shows us why we have the objective of establishing solid relationships. Relationships protect basic health so that we can reproduce.

Sothe URGENT MUST part of the conflict: "here is a POTENTIAL PARTNER; I must have this person or die!"

Your very life depends (literally) on reaching out to and securing that person in your life. That is not melodrama, it's science.

For all HEA Romances, that piece of the formula is established by the genre rules. The Urgent Must has to be an attraction to a partner and everything else is "complication" or background.

Now, the writer gets creative and the genre walls disappear into the distance. The writer can explore the universe finding things to prevent the attaining of this objective. What obstacles prevent people from forming partnerships?

The art of the romance novel lies in the variegated CAN'Ts writers have hurled at their characters.

What the CAN'T actually is does not matter as much as that it is just about equal to the MUST. To craft the HEA, there has to be a tangible chance that the Relationship won't gel.

But success has to be plausible, so the CAN'T has to have a "fatal flaw" that makes it believable that the two people do overcome this obstacle.

It is very possible that the low prestige of the Romance Novel (and particularly the Paranormal or SF Romance) comes from the choice of obstacle.

Some people may pick up Romances where the obstacle is fabricated, and in technical parlance, "contrived" so that it can be overcome. The "paper tiger" obstacle.

As a result, casual readers may judge all Romance to be "thin" -- a puppet show where the strings are visible.

Judging an entire genre by one or two novels is fairly common. Have you ever done that?

So, the Romance HEA is crafted from a scientificly verified array of MUSTS vs. artistically invented CAN'Ts. The HEA point is where the MUST overcomes the CAN'T -- i.e. the point where the conflict is resolved.

So tell me why all Romance isn't classed as Science Fiction Romance? If all Romance has the MUST part of the plot formula as a scientific premise, why isn't every Romance considered SFR?
The answer to this puzzle may be found by reading something outside the genre.

I have here a novel, a police procedural which raised the question of the HEA requirement again.




FLIPPING OUT by Marshall Karp. It's an April 2009 book I got from the amazon.com VINE program in ARC. It's copyright is held by a film company. I already posted my (4 star) review on amazon.

The intriguing premise is that a famous mystery writer is in a scheme to buy a run-down house, fix it up, write a murder mystery set in the house, then sell the house at auction on the day the book launches (complete with fictional murder victim's outline in tape on the bedroom floor).

It's set against the background of Hollywood. HUGE amount of money involved in the house flipping scheme -- very interesting background, like Columbo, a glimpse of the rich and famous.

It is a pretty good cut and dried, well turned and well written police procedural mystery with a nice clue-trail.

You can solve the mystery before the detectives do, but not TOO MUCH before, and the ending comes with a nice tricky TWIST shocker-scene, after which you get told what the detectives knew before you knew it. It's a good twist ending and provides a nice film moment for the climax. It's a good book.

Ah, BUT!!! There are many buts I didn't mention in my amazon review.

Reading this novel right in the midst of reading a sequence of fairly good fantasy novels, I found the contrast striking.

The mystery formula also requires an HEA ending. The mystery has to be SOLVED, and the reader has to feel satisfied that they could solve it as well or better than the detectives (but not a lot better because then it's too easy).

So while I'm thinking about the HEA reader requirement in Romance, I'm reading this mystery and second-guessing the detectives.

And I realized WHAT'S MISSING from FLIPPING OUT. It's a factor that I find very satisfying in say, Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus series. And that is characterization. It's a reason I like Columbo and Murder She Wrote, too. The mystery and its solution hinge entirely on the psychology and relationships of the victims, suspects AND the detectives!!

FLIPPING OUT provides a huge, stark, high relief contrast to the psychological drama type mysteries that I love. The stringent absence of the psychology dimension makes for a dry, clean, stark, and austere reading experience (very much like old fashioned neck-up science fiction, I discussed last week) that is, no doubt, very satisfying to the reader looking for that simple puzzle without any psychological tangles.

FLIPPING OUT puts the emotional lives of the bereaved, terrified and frustrated characters in the background while the foreground focuses on the puzzle itself. That's what this genre is supposed to do.

So this book is perfect of its kind, but unsatisfying to me. Yet it has the perfect ending for a mystery. The detectives solve the case which is equivalent to the HEA where the gal gets her guy and vice-versa.

At the halfway point, the darkest hour, the detectives think they solved it -- everyone above them thinks it's solved. The perp was the last person in the world they'd suspect. They're crushed. Then they discover they're wrong, and the perp is actually someone even more last-person-in-the-world than they'd expect.

FLIPPING OUT is likely to be a best seller, very popular, might even make a movie. The author's other novels have garnered serious respect, the sort we'd love to see SFR get as a genre.
What does FLIPPING OUT have that Science Fiction Romance doesn't?

Could it lie in the CAN'T rather than in the MUST part of the conflict formula?

One really great Romance that did make it onto TV as a series is BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.



This series spawned a plethora of fanfic on paper on on the web, and some really great fan novels, too. It grabbed the imagination of the SFR type reader-fan. But why did it fail on TV?

The premise stalled the plot.

The premise was that the couple could NEVER get together. That's not bad in itself. The CAN'T has to be formidable.

But the characters accepted the CAN'T. They didn't fight it. They didn't try scheme after scheme (like I LOVE LUCY plots). They didn't attempt to go public. They didn't plan to run away. Neither was willing to sacrifice to go live in the other's world.

Neither of the main characters was HEROIC about overcoming the plot premise CAN'T. And in the end, the writers tried to salvage that, change and evolve the premise by revealing that one of the characters was actually of non-human (alien from outer space) blood -- but by then the audience was losing interest.

They hadn't sold the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST series as SFR so the audience deserted them when they tried to turn it into SFR, making the problem solvable.

Why did the audience lose interest? Because the MUST didn't show any progress toward overcoming the CAN'T. The conflict was not moving to a resolution without breaking the original premise.

There couldn't be an HEA unless you changed the premise - which is of course what the fanfic writers did.

So contrast and compare FLIPPING OUT with BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and think about it. Too little psychology and the actions and reactions don't seem plausible enough to make a story interesting even if the plot is fascinating. Too much psychology and the story stalls dead in its tracks because there isn't the gumption to pay the price for conflict resolution.

To create the HEA effect (in any genre), the trick is matching the MUST (and its motives, conscious and subconscious) with the CAN'T (and its motives, conscious and subconscious), in such a way as to challenge each of the characters to overcome some internal barrier, to CHANGE (or ARC in screenwriting parlance) in a way that opens the opportunity for the MUST to overcome the CAN'T.

In the Murder Mystery Police Procedural the Must, Can't and HEA in the foreground is the whole, logical why-done-it puzzle. It's who knows whom and follow the money for motivation. The angst, grieving widowers, and fear of discovery are all way in the background, told rather than shown.

In the Alien Science Fiction Romance, the affairs of state, plot puzzles, science and logic of brain biochemistry are in the background, told rather than shown, while the angst, grief, fears, hopes, dreams, and fantasies are in the foreground, shown rather than told.

What is in the foreground and what is in the background very often determines the audience that will most appreciate the work of art.

Or the fanfic writers will reverse foreground and background to tell each other new stories.

For more on those psychological and spiritual internal barriers and how to construct them for your characters out of the material inside your reader's mind see my blog post:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/paradigm-shift.html

For a writing exercise related to setting up foreground and background and "worldbuilding" the background see my blog entry writing assignment and read the exercise posted as comments on

http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/2009/03/worldbuilding-trunk-ated.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.slantedconcept.com