Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part 7: Paranormal Romance

This blog entry is a direct sequel to last week's entry FINDING A GOOD PARANORMAL ROMANCE which was sparked by a twitter exchange.

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/finding-good-paranormal-romance.html

This is Part 7 of a series of posts on Worldbuilding.  The previous parts are here:

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-6.html

And that Part 6 has a list of the links to the previous 5 parts of this discussion scattered over the last few years -- and there have been other series of posts on the art, science and craft of "worldbuilding" that is the single most major element behind writing in general -- but is far more difficult when done to cradle an Alien Romance, or any science fiction or fantasy story. 

This Part 7 is a worldbuilding entry sparked by a series of comments made on Twitter by Noah Murphy ‏@K23Detectives  -- someone to follow and pay attention to.

These tweets came to my attention as I was finishing last week's blog entry and thinking how Paranormal Romance stories and novels are one of the most natural, easy, and obvious blends of 2 genres.

The "Paranormal" usually infers "horror" -- stories about the creepy-awful menace that lurks just out of sight and awareness, the non-rational world of nightmare rather than dream.

Romance, on the other hand infers "pleasant satisfaction" - the uplifting, delightful, fulfilling promise of all that lurks just out of sight, the Happily Ever After, the non-rational world of dream rather than nightmare.

These two genres depict the exact same thing, but from different points of view, with different interpretations.  Ghost Hunters vs. The Ghost And Mrs. Muir.

So Paranormal and Romance fit together at the level of theme.

Last week I pointed out the parallel between what Glenn Beck has done and what Paranormal Romance has not done, but needs to do if we are to be able to find the good Paranormal Romance novels. 

And I ended off last week asking:
What topic lies within PNR that has the same relationship to PNR that the Mexican Border does to American History?  And where can we find someone to set on fire with that topic?

My thesis was that the PNRomance field needs an Oprah Winfrey or Glenn Beck to aggregate the audience so that audience can rely on the source to find the "good PNR" and not waste time and money on unsatisfying reads. 

And lo! like magic Noah Murphy's tweets pointed at a topic PNR probably hasn't delved deeply into, but which would form a solid foundation for Paranormal worldbuilding.

As I pointed out in previous posts, the biggest "weakness" I see in highly professional Romance writers who try their hand at mixing genres is in the worldbuilding. 

When you don't use the real world, contemporary or historical, as background for your story, you must invent the details of your background, (worldbuild) not look them up! 

But you must invent a set of details that go together, each arising from the other in a pattern that resembles the reader's perception of their real world (not the actuality, but the perception which is why Glenn Beck and Oprah Winfrey are folks to study, not because of their topics but because of the radically different worldviews of their respective audiences.)

So here's an example of a "topic" within Paranormal Romance which might be the igniting topic that could set the right spokesman on fire and create us a Glenn Beck of our own.

SEEING IS BELIEVING

If you've read my blog entries on the use of THEME, you recognize that statement as a THEME.  And it is a natural theme for a Paranormal Romance. 

Here are the tweets that stopped my eye and ignited my brain:

Noah Murphy ‏@K23Detectives
There's also a very major full on Chasidic black-hat Jewish hero in the book. But since his job requires him to deal with immodest women

Noah Murphy ‏@K23Detectives
He puts his personal feeling aside and just does his job but he believes god cares more about him helping then seeing immodest women.

And there were more tweets on this topic, an exchange on nudity and clothing styles, as well as porn and religion.  You meet some fascinating people on twitter!!! 

Noah Murphy is a writer working on a story that includes this Chasidic detective.

I know nothing else about that story, but the exchange about clothing styles came to me right after seeing an entire Chasidic lecture on the various warnings in the Torah about "following your eyes."

Naturally, I sought ways of arguing various sides of this thesis on SEEING being the root of temptation.

The thesis was that the admonition not to follow your eyes was based on an inherent feature of the human being -- that when you SEE an image or a thing, you want it, you grab for it.

It's true infants will grab at colored shapes -- it's how we learn eye-hand-coordination.

It's possible this attribute persists into adulthood, morphed by the rise of sexual awareness.

And we're all familiar with how the sight of something that looks delicious makes our mouths water, makes us WANT that delicious thing regardless of whether we were wanting it before we saw it.

SEEING is powerful.

We know that the structure of the human eye gives us a survival advantage - we see in color and in three dimensions.  Some other species have other kinds of advantages -- eagles have sharp far-sight, insects have segmented eyes that see in many directions at once, etc.

But the human eye linked to the human brain works marvels.

When it comes to the Paranormal Romance, we usually have to write something about those who are aware of the Paranormal dimension as contrasted with those who have no awareness.  And the interesting hook into a Paranormal adventure is that moment when someone unaware SEES and believes for the first time that the world is different than they had ever thought.

All religions have something in them that requires belief in something you can't SEE.

That's why so many use statues or other symbols, so that which is believed-in can become tangible, real because it's seen.

The practitioners of a religion (any religion) are often the ones who know the least about that religion.  So the topic that could ignite interest in the Paranormal Romance could be something as simple as "What really goes on when you SEE something?"

That's like "What's really going on at the Mexican/USA border?"  Innocent little question with a million topics connected to it.  It opens like a rose.

Mystical practitioners often call those who can see the future Seers -- not prophets who are shown by God, but people who just look and See.

Seeing is believing.  See a ghost, and your concept of reality adjusts. (show-don't-tell, remember?)

In a near-death experience, seeing your own body from the outside adjusts your view of reality.

Seeing something you've never seen before, never believed existed, makes you sensitive in a certain way.  You are more likely to See it again.

So why do practitioners of many religions want to conceal the human form (mostly the female, but in many cases also the male)? 

Most people have a completely eroneous assumption about why religions rule to conceal the human form or flesh.  In the era of "Enlightenment" (or the era of science as our god), when a religion says "don't expose your (whatever part of the anatomy)" we hear that the physical eye must not see the physical flesh.

What if that's not the true origin of the decree? 

What if it isn't the physical eyeball that is the problem? 

What if it is some other part of the human that must be concealed, a part the Enlightened are so certain does not exist?

What if the signal from the human eyeball reaches the human brain and ignites something above and beyond the human physical body? 

What if repeated stimulation of that part of you causes you to be unable to sense the presence of  God? 

Think about how constant exposure to a certain smell makes you unable to smell it anymore.  Smokers, for example, have no idea how much they stink! 

There's a principle in Magic quoted as, "As Above; So Below" (and it works vice-versa -- when you understand what's Below (in our real world) you can more easily understand what's Above, (in the astral plane and higher).

The theory of Magic holds that the world is created in congruent layers, that there is a single underlying pattern that repeats and repeats.  Maybe that's not true, but some part of the basic human being operates as if it were true, so writers who worldbuild with those congruent layers make readers believe every (silly) word they write.

So it's not farfetched to postulate that the Soul or the immortal part of you, the part that reincarnates, or that "Goes To Heaven" after you die, (or gets trapped as a ghost?) has "senses" that work like our real-world senses do.

You know how you can lose something in a familiar room -- your car keys for example.  The keys are sitting there in plain sight where you always put them, but you search four or five times before you SEE them.  They become invisible against the familiar, just as the smell of nicotine is un-smellable against the miasma that surrounds a smoker. 

The constant din in a noisy room, even a workplace, can be filtered out to the point where you aren't aware of it until a newcomer winces! 

So if our material-body senses work like that, perhaps the Soul's senses work the same way? 

A Paranormal Romance (Soul Mates; Happily Ever After ending Romance) writer could easily postulate that the real reason (unknown even to the Authorities currently running a religion) for the necessity of "modest" dress (defined differently by each religion), is based on the responses of the Soul, not the eyeball or the body.

Here's one from Kabbalah.  There is a concept in the mystical studies that indicates the spirit of God envelopes a couple during copulation and orchestrates conception.  That this whole process is a process of Souls much more sensitive than the process involving the body is.

Done one way, the child that results turns out a certain way.  Done differently, the resulting child is different.  Acting to prevent conception can have far-reaching consequences that has little to do with what we think of as "my life." 

In other words, sexuality has a Paranormal dimension.  It's a fabulous Fantasy premise that hasn't been explored -- just as Glenn Beck's Mexican Border Situation hadn't been explored.

So, it's possible to worldbuild a Paranormal Romance around the SEEING IS BELIEVING theme element that the best way to sensitize the Soul so it can percieve the presence of the Divine in the material world (and thus get Life to work more smoothly around you, e.g. finding your Soul-Mate and Living Happily Ever After), is to avoid certain SIGHTS.

That is one grand paradox fraught with ripe conflict!  Paranormal conflict!  Ghosts, Warlocks, Witches, Spells, Incantations, Goblins, Trolls, Vampires -- it all takes on a totally different twist when seen through the eyes that avoid certain sights in order to see other sights.  It might be like avoiding looking at oncoming headlights at night in order to be able to see the road. 

If you could pull that off, you could be writing a very sexy Paranormal Romance targeted at Glenn Beck's 30-million-strong audience.  Somewhere among them (probably the most skeptical ones trained best in critical thinking) might be the Oprah Winfrey of the Paranormal Romance field.

BTW: the "fire and ice" of the series title here might be thought of as Religion and Science, or maybe it's Science and Religion?  Either way, to worldbuild a cradle for a convincing story, you must have both in your world because they are pillars of our world.   

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Finding a Good Paranormal Romance

And once more twitter friends spark a subject we need to cover in Alien Romance:

I Retweeted this tweet from @dearauthor:
JLichtenberg: RT @dearauthor: I feel like my reading mojo is back. I've actually liked a few books in a row. 2 of them PNRs.

@freyasbower answered @dearauthor and tagged me in the answer thusly:

freyasbower: @dearauthor @JLichtenberg Perhaps it's not your mojo so much as the books. (g) 2:48pm, Jun 14 from Twitter for Mac

So I answered but forgot to tag @dearauthor

JLichtenberg: @freyasbower That's my thesis. I believe the creative torch has passed to the PNR field. Even non-PNR readers will find mojo there 3:00pm, Jun 14 from HootSuite

freyasbower: @JLichtenberg I have always been a fan of well-written PNR. It's finding it that can be challenging. 3:06pm, Jun 14 from Twitter for Mac

JLichtenberg: @freyasbower I need to blog about HOW TO FIND well-written PNR, why it's necessary, and why it's hard to find 8:07am, Jun 15 from HootSuite

freyasbower: @JLichtenberg you do. I am sure there are more authors out there who write it, but it gets buried .... 8:08am, Jun 15 from Twitter for iPhone

So let's tackle the issue of FINDING the "good" books among the undifferentiated flood of novels coming from a multitude of new small publishers, from the giant presses of mass market machines, and even more titles than both put together coming from self-publishing authors.

All these writers are trying to "stand out" or to get the readers' attention, to get "reviews" on Amazon or any blog that has traffic.

Even writers publishing via the mass market machines have to do their own "Me! LOOK AT ME! BUY MY BOOK!!!" publicity.

In most genre fiction, but especially Romance and Science Fiction/Fantasy it's always been that way, though in science fiction and Romance to a certain extent, a writer who said "buy my book" in any form lost credibility. With self-publishing, that's once more becoming a problem. 

Mass Market writers were supposed to step aside, fold hands, put their eyes down, and meekly let the professionals market their books. 

A mass market publisher generally does 4 to 10 titles a month, some of them reprints (though not in Romance usually).  The publisher has a monthly budget to promote the books, and decisions are made in committee which books to promote.  Usually the whole budget goes on the Lead title, with a little left for the second title, and the rest of the books fall where they may without promotion.

The most effective "promotion" done by publishers is not seen by readers.  These are not TV ads, magazine ads, newspaper ads that readers might see.  The magazine and newspapers that these ads go into are subscribed to book wholesalers and retailers, not consumers -- though some specialty magazines like LOCUS may be included and reach some readers of a genre.

Here's a typical list of targets for a heavily promoted major release:


National review and feature attention
Print advertising campaign to (whatever) interest groups
Advertising campaign at major general-interest sites like the New York Times book blast or NewYorker.com
Pre-publication buzz campaign through Shelf Awareness, Goodreads, Library Thing, and Read it Forward
Major blogger outreach to literary, historical fiction, and (whatever special)interest blogs
Included in all launch promotions of that publisher's imprint
Extensive bookseller, library, and academic mailing
Outreach to (whatever special interest) organizations
Major book group outreach
Author tours and Events

Where it says New York Times, it mostly means getting them to review or discuss it, sometimes website ads.  A few titles get actual ads to readers printed on review pages. 

The promotion that costs the most money is done to get the books into stores, before readers eyes, into the front window of the store, into a "dump" (a box set up in the aisle), or splashed at you on amazon etc, and to get it sold at a discount at certain huge outlets (like Sam's Club, B&N, and Amazon).  Promotion money is also spent on getting super-spiffy art for the cover, and sending out review copies.  As mentioned on #scifichat in June, the cover is the foundation of the marketing campaign.  If there's no campaign, they don't spend much on the cover.  Big money these days is spent on YouTube book-trailers, but many of those are paid for by the author. 

Promotion money is spent and campaigns announced like that to force reviewers for major publication such as big city newspapers to review the book, interview the author, etc.  If you are major newspaper or magazine reviewer, you don't dare not-cover what everyone is talking about or pretty soon you aren't "major" anymore!  So shouting about the publicity budget for a book gets books into bookstores.  Note that item Pre-publication buzz -- that's for real, and it is what actually does the trick to sell lots of copies.  They put that list on the back cover of ADVANCE READING COPIES (the ARCs reviewers get before all the typos are fixed) to shame reviewers into reviewing the book that "everyone" is buzzing about.   

A title that is not #1 or #2 on the publisher's monthly List has NO REVIEW COPIES sent out to newspapers, magazines, and these days, bloggers.  None of the things on that list are financed by the publisher for books that aren't at the top of their monthly release list.  Publishers shout like that to try to "find the readership" for that particular book. 

They "shout" like that about books they think will sell enough copies to more than pay for the "shouting" budget.  It's all about perceptions and economics.  If they promote an author's book like that and it does not sell big enough, the author's next book is not bought or not promoted at all.  Sometimes shouting works and gathers the audience.  Sometimes, even with a worthy book, it doesn't gather enough of an audience to be worth the expense of the shout.  Paying for an author to tour some big cities and sign autographs is another item in the budget for an author whose previous promotions have more than paid off.   

If the publisher shouts about the book, or if the writer does (and finances) the shouting, it amounts to the same thing -- advertising.  It's a way of saying "I want you to pay me money."  Or "I want you to pay attention to me." 

The publisher lacks credibility because the publisher has an investment in the book they want to make back and then some.

The writer lacks credibility for that reason and the inherent lack of judgement the creator of a work has about their own work. 

Publicity is the publisher or the writer, the one who invests in creating the work, looking for an audience.  It's not working well these days, so maybe the process needs scrutiny and re-evaluation. 

Paper publishing is dying because of the economics of printing, warehousing, trucking, and returning unsold copies.  Amazon's marketing innovation helps a lot, but they don't warehouse a lot of books all at once.  You see that "only 2 copies left" sign on pages "more coming" and you know they don't stock what they sell.  That's killing paper publishing.

But now that there's a good reading screen technology, e-books are taking off.  Paper is moving to print on demand except for those books with a pre-assembled mass market.   Check out Glenn Beck's best-seller statistics -- every book he releases is a category killer on Amazon.  He is reaching an audience of about 30,000,000  per month, (yeah, thirty million) and most of them are voracious readers, just not in Paranormal Romance! 

That's the number Beck himself gives for his "reach" and it includes all his media outlets - radio, print books, email newsletters, the online newspaper The Blaze (drawing about 7,000 hits per day he says), and about 300,000 paying subscribers to his web-only TV network gbtv.com (which is viewable in full HD and has state-of-the-art color).  He's in the midst of combining The Blaze and gbtv.com putting more news shows on his network and building it to a 24-hour operation.  

By studying what Glenn Beck has done for books about his (hobbyhorse) topics, we can discover how to find PNR novels that please us as keenly as Beck pleases his audience.  Nevermind what his books are about, they please his specific readership so perfectly his readership is growing by leaps and bounds and you see his books in Sam's Club!  Want to see our books in Sam's Club?  Costco?  Study what he's done. 

Since he was a teen, Beck has been a radio broadcaster -- talk show host.  His original training is in humor, comedy, standup I think, and maybe clowning.  He reverts to that schtick often, and sounds a discordant note that destroys his credibility where he actually has a bit of fact that needs thinking about buried under his behavior.  It's almost as if talking about a real fact embarrasses him. 

But his target audience eats up the clowning about facts and begs for more. 

It seems that Glenn Beck has FOUND HIS AUDIENCE, just as publishers try to "find an audience" for a book they believe they can make money by selling. 

I am not at all sure (I don't study Beck closely enough to tell) if he understands what has happened to him, and what he has done that's resulted in having this audience, but studying the phenomenon can tell us how to winnow out the great PNR novels that we need to read from the background noise of millions of novels that should have gone through another 10 drafts before being published. 

Years ago, when Radio talk-show hosts began "breaking into" TV, Beck got jobs with Cable TV channels.

I'm not sure of his resume before he worked at CNN where I first saw him (or heard of him).  I think he had been at a broadcast network before that.  CNN was a trial and a half for him because they keep commentators on a short-leash as do the broadcast networks ABC, NBC and CBS. CNN is has hit its lowest ratings in Spring 2012 and subsequently changed a number of their anchor personalities, bringing onboard at least one "Conservative" commentator.  Watch how that works out -- it is just like publishing, searching for what the audience wants. 

A viewer of these commentators thinks she's looking at a person and hearing what that person thinks.  Nope, not what's happening, any more than when you pick up a book from a mass market publisher's imprint, you are reading the book the writer wanted to write! Those 10 drafts mentioned above that self-publishing writers tend to skip, and that "short leash" mentioned above that networks use on commentators are similar marketing/publicity mechanisms.  The catch-all term for the whole process is "packaging" -- news segments have to be "shot" and then "packaged."  It's a complex process aimed at "finding an audience." 

See my series on EDITING to get this into your head.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html  has links to previous 6 entries.

Writers who aren't able or willing to conform their output to the specifications of mass market publishers don't sell to mass market publishers.  It is very possible that those non-conformists are the writers who are writing what you want most to read - what you would enjoy most!  The content of Mass Market books has been "watered down" to reach a broader audience via mass market "packaging."  Even small publishers have to do "packaging" or go out of business.  Self publishers will give up after a while, if it's just not worth the effort, or they'll learn packaging. 

It's about effort/return ratio -- you've got to have a ratio that's considerably less than 1.00 or you'll quit. 

You can't write and self-publish on smashwords a 100,000 word novel and sell 1 copy and then do it again.  Very soon, you'll just stop publishing unless 1 becomes 2 becomes 4, 8, 16, etc. - positive feedback works. 

EDITING - (and with books, agenting) - all goes in between the reader, and the writer's imagination.

Being a "good writer" means being able to write what the editors and the publishers editors work for THINK will sell.  Agents are in the business of slush-pile-reading to find the exact books editors have been instructed by their publishers to package and send to the bookstores.  "Bookstores" are in the business of finding and presenting what their customers want.  Agents are the people who find or train the authors who consistently perform those novel styles that are selling best at bookstores at this moment.

Writing is a performing art, remember?  You don't write a book, you PERFORM a TROPE of a GENRE, just as a pianist performs Chopin.  We've covered that in many previous posts.  I learned it in 7th Grade from a professional writer, Alma Hill, who mentored me then!  And it's still true today. Writing is a performing art, just like standup comedy. 

So what Glenn Beck has done that's given him an audience of 30 million about 1 million of whom buy each book with his name on it (even if he didn't write it all by himself) is exactly what PNR writers need to do -- FIND THEIR AUDIENCE.

Publishers who invest in marketing as noted above are expecting to "target an audience" -- to find a pre-made, pre-assembled audience, a social-network, that's going to want to buy that book the instant they hear of it.  Successful self-publishing writers already have made an audience like that, just one too small or too scattered to be worth the kind of money big publishers spend promoting big titles. 

Authors running around looking for an audience for something they wrote rather than performed, have no more success than Glenn Beck did when he was just a radio broadcaster!  And they have even less credibility than Beck has now when they say "buy my book."   

Beck's stint at CNN let him shoot off a few arrows of his own opinions in various directions, and they struck home with a small segment of the CNN audience (which was much bigger then than it is now). 

I recall seeing Beck do a whole segment on the Mexican border and drug running issues, cartel wars, and the terrorist infiltration of the action at the border when he was on CNN.  The segment promised a lot more on that topic -- but every time I cruised through (I comparison shop news and don't believe ANY of it) he wasn't on that topic again.

Then he moved to Fox, and I caught most of his opening show there (totally by accident because I was cooking at the hour he was on, my hands too greasy to flip the channel) -- and he promised to do a whole, in depth, never let it drop expose of the Mexican border issues on successive shows.  He ranted on about being so happy to have moved to a network that would let him cover the Mexican border issues. 

He didn't go on to cover that topic, and because I know what "editing" means, I knew someone had shut him up.  They (networks) pay thousands of dollars for pollster tracking of audience not only after a show, but the pulse of tune-ins/tune-outs during a show.  Very complicated, very expensive stuff -- Beck's border presentation probably pulled really low interest.  Or it may have just discomforted someone high in the organization -- I'm guessing, here I don't know and I don't really care much.  They squashed him. 

My objective here is to solve the problem of getting GOOD PNR to the RIGHT readers who will actually glean something important from reading the novel.  Paranormal Romance Novels are where the fire is in our field right now, just as the border war and terrorism is where the "fire" of interest was in one segment of CNN's audience when Beck mentioned it. 

If PNR writers lose credibility (and audience share like Beck apparently did at CNN) when they go searching for an audience, then writers can't do what all editors and agents insist the writer must do herself, and FIND HER AUDIENCE.

I'm beginning to wonder about the standard interpretation of how publicity works. 

Maybe the writer can't find the audience.

Maybe the audience must find the writer.

BUT HOW???? 

What did Glenn Beck do?  By the end of his stint at Fox he was reaching maybe 35 million a month, through all his media -- website, email newsletters, books from his Mercury division, blogs, and while at Fox he founded the news organization that publishes the online newspaper THE BLAZE.

When he left Fox and began his own network, gbtv.com  he lost a lot of those people because gbtv.com is a network you can get only via the web, not on cable or broadcast.

But as his organization has produced some truly high-polish, slick, and informative (and serious, not comedy schtick ridden) SPECIALS on various news subjects, the web-tv-subscription audience has grown.  The one Special he said brought a substantial increase in his viewers was the third in a series, and it's topic is the Mexican border/drug cartel/terrorist wars issue he got squashed for talking about on cable news, twice. 

That one subject has let his audience FIND HIM AGAIN -- and he's up to 300,000 subscribers (which is more than watch some shows on CNN or Fox).  It's been less than 1 year since he left Fox and launched his web-network.  Audiences of Beck's size are not coalescing around broadcast network TV -- see my blog entry on TARGETING AN AUDIENCE part 5 on this blog, July 31, 2012. 
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/07/targeting-readership-part-5-where-is.html
Note Beck doesn't have just one show.  He's been adding shows fast, and has I think maybe 5 different shows and his daily radio show done with cameras and up in video on his gbtv.com website. And he's gaining advertisers, many who advertise on regular networks. 

Likewise note this news item that appeared Aug. 3, 2012:
http://news.yahoo.com/forget-cord-cutters-cable-companies-worry-cord-nevers-161055968.html

---------QUOTE----------
Cord-never numbers are particularly hard to measure. A cable company, of course, can't report the amount of people who never subscribed to them in the first place, but we can do some piecing together to get an idea of the changing trends. U.S. census data found that 1.8 million new households were formed, but that only 16.9 percent of those signed up for pay-TV services, according to Ad Age's Dan Hirschorn. The TV industry has been flat for years; U.S. households continue to rise. Meanwhile, as cable subscription rates have stayed flat, Internet subscriptions are on the rise. Comcast added 156,000 net broadband subscribers, an 8.4% increase; Time Warner added 59,000 residential high-speed Internet subscribers. While something like 100 million U.S. households subscribe to TV services, the U.S. 2010 census data had 120 million households with Internet -- those numbers have only risen since then, with these companies reporting increased subscriptions. And what do people do on the Internet? Watch things. Though the most popular Internet activity, as of 2010, was social networking, video saw a 12 percent increase, according to a Neilsen report. Though, those numbers include people with cable.
-----------END QUOTE-----------


But also consider this item from June 2008, just 4 years ago:
http://dealnews.com/features/Unplugged-Trading-Cable-TV-for-Internet-TV/231073.html
-----------QUOTE from end of that article----
One Month Later
It's been over a month since I gave up cable TV and a lot has happened since my first week of Internet TV. Content-wise, Hulu continues to refine its service introducing full episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. In addition, the site is running a Hulu Days of Summer promotion where new content is introduced every weekday. A nice way to bring people back to the site each day. Meanwhile, Univision.com has launched a new portal and streamed its first, full-length, online concert by Latin Grammy winner, Fonseca. The micro site, which is called En Directo, is sponsored by Toyota (the ads are very aggressive) and will feature additional concerts, downloadable songs, backstage footage, and more. I'm not a fan of the artist, but I am impressed with the amount of online video you can find on Univision.com. It appears the site has even struck a deal with CNET.com and is translating many of its tech reviews into Spanish (it'll be interesting to see how this relationship plays out once CNET.com is owned by CBS.com). Although I speak Spanish fluently, I was never a heavy Univision watcher, but having more video options online never hurt.
On a more personal note, I'm back to my old TV-viewing habits, watching TV in the morning and in the evening when I get home from work. When I miss an episode I want to watch, I now turn to Hulu (when appropriate) instead of recording shows onto my DVR. I'm also more comfortable bringing my laptop into the kitchen and watching Internet TV from my kitchen counter — something I felt awkward doing before. Ironically, I also turn to the Internet for new shows (shows that I've never seen like "Dexter" or shows that are no longer shown on TV like "Arrested Development") and if I like them, I look for them on TV. Unfortunately, I didn't lose any weight during my cable-free month, and I have once again associated eating with watching TV.
But perhaps the biggest change in my everyday routine is the amount of time I spend online. Whereas before I would go online just to check e-mail, I'm now online the minute I get home. Most of the time I'm reading new blogs I discovered during my cable-free month, but the amount of time I spend online has spiked dramatically since the month of May.

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

So compare 2008 to 2012 (Beck's web network started in 2011 and is about to expand again).  In fact, in 2008, Beck hadn't even moved to Fox and rocked the world with his ideas.  That's how fast this world is changing - the world of connectivity, of fiction at your fingertips, and thousands of other ways to spend/waste your time.

The potential and possibilities for living without cable or broadcast TV are expanding just that fast.

Glenn Beck's audience wanted his product and searched him out.  They found him; he didn't find them.

No matter what you think of Glenn Beck's message, study the process by which he's come to have the means to deliver that message to the target audience.   

Many of his audience are older people who owned old TV sets that couldn't connect to the internet.  Many don't have computers, though most do.  I haven't seen smartphone distribution figures among seniors either, but according to the Verizonwireless website's offer of a $20/month discount to seniors for a low-call, charge per text, very low data amount plan, Seniors can be relied on to NOT use the features of their smartphones.

So Verizon is offering seniors that discount on all the phones they sell.  And their stock is up over the last four years. 

That tech-reluctance of seniors may change quickly as a new generation becomes senior.  Apparently many older seniors have upgraded their technology this year to get at the one product they wanted, Glenn Beck's opinions. 

Nevermind that you don't want Beck's opinions.  The PNR novels you write are your opinions, and they are of as marginal an appeal as Beck's opinions on the Mexican border were when he was at Fox. 

Speaking of the Mexican border, here's another article from Aug. 2, 2012 on that subject, asserting that what Beck predicted several years ago, actually is happening now.  The Mexican border topic is one of Beck's hobby horses that has gotten him a lot of attention because nobody wanted his opinion on it. 

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/08/economics-mexican-drug-tunnels/55387/

Nobody wants your opinions right now either.  And as a reader or writer of PNR, you are searching for the opinions of someone as marginalized as Beck is!  Your problem is really the same problem that he had, and he's solved it.  Figure out how he did it! 

Analyzing his audience, I have found it isn't ALL older people.  There's a wave of 20-somethings, and even teens, who are absolutely caught up in what he's doing.  Those 20-somethings are not likely to be readers of PNR either, but they found what they want in Beck's program. 

Again, forget what he's doing and focus on how he's doing it.

People will say HE FOUND HIS AUDIENCE -- but as I noted above his audience found him.

Beck says George Soros spent millions "discrediting" him -- some Soros funded organizations funded other organizations that funded organizations that hired bloggers to use filthy language emphatically lying about what Beck said on the air, thus discrediting Beck. 

I don't know about the hiring part, but I've seen the blog comments -- the exact same blog comments word for misspelled word turning up on news commentary threads  on various articles having nothing to do with the filthy-language comment on Beck.  I've seen copy/paste clones of those comments on Beck turn up day after day - the same comments, on different news item blogs, on different days, posted under different poster-handles. 

Being curious, I started watching the actual broadcasts and listened to what Beck said exactly, then looked for what the blog commentators said he said.  The claim that someone hired people to paste filthy-language comments all over the blogosphere is a logical way to interpret what I've seen.  But I have no knowledge of how these things happened, only that Beck never said most of what's attributed to him, but as the furor increased so did Beck's audience share.

Maybe we need George Soros to fund an anti-PNR campaign complete with filthy language?  Naw, that wold never work.

But just like Beck, PNR doesn't say what most people say it says.  Same campaign was waged against Dungeons & Dragons years ago and it got more popular the more it was opposed. 

I'm not nearly as interested in Glenn Beck (and his hobbyhorses) as I am in the audience response to him -- his audience found him.  HOW DID THEY DO THAT???? (other than the discrediting campaign blog comments)

If I can figure out how they did that, I can figure out how to FIND the PNR novels that need finding and develop a readership of millions (30 million readers -- think about that!  It's not unreasonable for an audience size: there are 330 million people in the USA alone!).

Note my most current novel, THE FARRIS CHANNEL is Paranormal but not Romance (has an offstage love story or two, but love/romance does not drive the plot).  I'm not telling you "buy my book" or "be my audience" or "find me!"  -- though that might be nice -- I'm trying to figure out how PNR readers can find their "Glenn Beck."

If we can't gain respect in one-step, maybe we can attain it by becoming vilified first?  I just don't like that idea.  No.  There has to be another way. 

You, as reader don't need to find the writer of PNR novels you want to read, but you need to find a "Glenn Beck" a spokesman that gathers a book-buying public.  That spokesman has to be someone we can rely on to bring to our attention  'the best PNR novels.' 

We have some great Romance blogs like Galaxy Express but they don't have 30 million readers!  (Million; think about that 30 million.)

Here's a web-radio talk-show that interviews authors and loves SF, Fantasy, Romance and PNR.  If you're a writer, contact them.  It's not 30 million (yet) but it's a start.

-------QUOTE FROM THE PROMOTION-----------

EDUCATES -- ENLIGHTENS -- ENTERTAINS

PWRTALK is the network with the best experts and programming that provides a conduit for voices not otherwise heard in this noisy techno and digitalized world. In the first 6 months of 2012, PWRTALK received 1 million new listeners. In the first 2 weeks of July, PWRTALK received another 1/4 million new listeners. For WebTV and audio interviews, please contact Lillian Cauldwell at 734-827-9407 or email

pwrtalknetwork@gmail.com.

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

Oprah Winfrey has lost and not regained her audience as she moved to create her own Cable network, but she was this kind of spokesman for her kind of "personal expose" book. 

When Beck has a guest on his show who's written a book, that book shoots to the top tiers on Amazon just as Oprah Winfrey's guests' books did.  Beck's audience listens to radio (and web-radio), watches TV, and behold -- READS BOOKS. 

When he left Fox, by contract he couldn't take the research he'd done there on their dime.  He can't use clips from his own Fox show.  And he can't afford to re-do that research from scratch (it was hugely expensive, though his show overall was cheap-cheap).  So he's been gathering sponsors, and subscribers (you have to have internet access (Roku but not Amazon will get the show for you) plus a gbtv.com subscription which is I think $100/year) to get his shows.  I absolutely must figure out how his audience has found him.  He didn't find them, though he tried for decades.  Suddenly, they found him! 

Once he got feedback for his passionate presentation of the Mexican border situation (being squashed indicates there's something there), he began researching, asking questions, looking for answers, searching out the roots of movements under the surface of US culture.  That quest became the core of his Fox show, and when he did a months long presentation on American History, his ratings soared.  His audience found him. 

The audience's responses and interest guided his research, his efforts, and touched something in him that ignited his personal curiosity, a need-to-know just like any writer's fascination with a story idea.  He's half journalist, and he had grabbed hold of a journalistic subject.  His audience touched off his explosion of interest in American History that led to the series of "revelations" he's presented that keep attracting more viewers.  He's a showman by nature -- anything that ignites an audience to enthusiasm will ignite him to out-perform himself, but he's also a shrewd business man (I have a sketch of his natal chart).  Once he mentioned a topic that got a ratings spike, his own interest in it spiked -- maybe it was dollar signs, or maybe it was his need for applause (he's a comedian by training). 

All writers are like that, PNR writers most especially are on the lookout for feedback, for applause, for understanding.  What gets audience response, gets more attention from the writer in the next book. 

Beck's audience found him sitting there on CNN like an unlit candle, and they touched fire to his wick.  He took that fire to Fox and found a bigger audience and became a much bigger candle. 

Beck's audience used him to get what it wanted.  The audience milked him, not the other way around as observers always think!  As a writer, I know what that feels like.  When an editor wants more, I find more!

The PNR audience needs to find a Glenn Beck of PNR.  Who?  How?  Where? 

I don't have the entire answer yet, but I do have an "app" on my iPod and Kindle that gets "radio" and can get internet radio shows.  Apple has subscriptions to podcasts. This is a growing business while paper publishing is shrinking.

You can dock your iPhone or iPod in your car's dashboard and make internet radio come out of your car's speakers while you commute.  Or subscribe to sat radio. 

Other than commuting, I don't know where people find time to "listen to radio" -- but they do!  See TARGETING AN AUDIENCE PART 5 again and that link above to unplugging from cable TV -- people are abandoning cable TV, broadcast TV, to the point where there are fewer and fewer TV Series, and the ones that exist do fewer shows per year.  People are doing something with their time.  Ebook sales are UP.  People watch movies streaming on Amazon on their TV screens and smartphones!  You can watch movies on Kindle Fire wherever you can get a fast wi-fi connection. 

There's a huge audience, a veritable tsunami of an audience, sloshing around looking for the Glenn Beck of their field, whatever that field may be.  PNR is only one of many fields that needs a Glenn Beck. 

Glenn Beck just about invented his field -- this whole schtick he's done on American History, and his examination of the cultural shifts we've been living through is put together from scratch.  He's going into the music business and the feature film business next.  He's holding huge "Events" people go to just to have a good time bringing the whole family exploring American history and cultural roots.  Imagine filling a football stadium with lovers of PNR! He filled Cowboy Stadium with 65,000 people July 28, 2012 and there's a video of that program on his website (or maybe on gbtv.com ). 

How can we do that?  There are podcasters and web radio talk shows interviewing authors, pulling in audiences numbering in the thousands.  But not 30 million.  65,000 yeah, probably, but not 30 million.

Why should we bother trying to ignite a Glenn Beck or Oprah Winfrey of our own?  What has PNR got in it that our lives "need" the way Beck's audience thirsts for whatever it is they get out of watching him?  (I haven't figured that out, yet, either.)

Until he started talking about the Mexican border and got squashed by his employers for it, he didn't have this kind of mojo. 

What topic lies within PNR that has the same relationship to PNR that the Mexican Border does to American History?  And where can we find someone to set on fire with that topic? 

On twitter, they now show you this notice if you click on the CHANGE link on TRENDING NOW on their page: Trends offer a unique way to get closer to what you care about. Trends are tailored for you based on your location and who you follow. 

Maybe that 'trending now' feature will help us find our very own Glenn Beck to aggregate the PNR audience, our Oprah Winfrey. 

Here's a QUOTE from a recent item on what Oprah is doing from a Financial News item in June 2012:

http://news.yahoo.com/whos-landing-big-interviews-oprah-072652495--finance.html

--------------QUOTE-----------

Faced with the potential failure of her money-pit cable network OWN, Winfrey is working the phones hard to secure big-name interviews for her show, "Oprah's Next Chapter." Back-to-back episodes last Sunday featured the Kardashian family and rapper 50 Cent, and the Kardashians will be back this weekend. Michael Jackson's daughter Paris and the late Whitney Houston's family made news with their interviews in recent weeks.

The open question is whether she can have the same cultural impact on a smaller stage. Winfrey's daytime talk show was generally seen by around 6 million people in her final years; "Oprah's Next Chapter" with the Kardashians was seen by 1.1 million viewers, according to the Nielsen company.

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

Beck's viewership isn't in Oprah's ballpark there, but his "reach" including all his media is bigger.

I'll get back to this topic when I do figure it out.  Meanwhile, don't get blindsided by the video gaming industry.  Study that, too.  

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Amber Benson and Kathryn Leigh Scott Actresses and Writers

You may remember I discussed Amber Benson's first Calliope Reaper-Jones novel, Death's Daughter in August 2009.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/amber-benson-tara-on-buffy-vampire.html

Amber Benson played Tara on Buffy, a character who stole the show as layers of her background were peeled away to reveal startling and unexpected truths.

I met her on Twitter -- @Amber_Benson  -- check her out!

Since then she has had a second novel in her series published titled Cat's Claw-- and they're GOOD.

There are few writers whose novels pass all my technical craft tests (even Mass Market published writers), the attributes I talk about here in my posts about craft.  Amber Benson does. 

She has some prior books she's contributed to, which I haven't read yet, so take a look here:

Amber Benson

Amber Benson has a very distinctive writer's "voice" that is pleasant even when speaking (in the first person) for a tough-as-nails woman, or a woman who is soon to become as tough as nails.

See next week's entry here "Source of the Expository Lump Part 2" for more on Voice and how to find yours.

Benson handles the ugly truth of the world straight, with no compromises, but reading these stories doesn't make you feel ugly.  She makes her readers feel good about themselves.  It's an odd and very valuable talent, and to me that effect creates a dimension of realism indispensable in a Fantasy novel.

But it's also a rare talent.  Now I've found someone else who writes with that kind of a pleasant "voice" that is very easy to read even when confronting the ugliest aspects of the world.

She is, like Benson, also an actress with a TV series that has to be a favorite among readers of this blog, Dark Shadows.

Kathryn Leigh Scott played Barnabus Collins' bride on Dark Shadows.

Now Kathryn has done something unique that you should take note of if you are at all interested in PNR.

Kathryn created a new, original Urban Fantasy universe, a parallel world perhaps, where a young would-be actress (very different from herself) goes to New York to seek her fame and glory.

And she does two things Kathryn actually did.  She works as a Playboy Bunny serving drinks (giving us a glimpse of a real world as it was decades ago), and she lands a minor part in a startup afternoon soap opera TV show to be broadcast live.

This is both urban fantasy and historical novel, as the detail depicted of that era of live-TV afternoon soaps distributed by kinescope is extremely accurate but written without any expository lumps.

I will talk a bit about expository lumps again next week because it has a lot to do with Voice.

For now I want to point you to Dark Passages, this treasure of a novel about a parallel universe "Dark Shadows" TV show, and a young woman with Vampiric type supernatural powers she is determined not to use to 'get ahead' in The Industry.

Here is a link to a group of books by Kathryn Leigh Scott.  One is titled DARK SHADOWS.

Dark Passages leads to a list of some of her books.


But the one I'd like you to pay attention to is Dark Passages:

Dark Passages  this link leads to a single novel. 

Dark Passages is billed as a Romance, but it's not strictly speaking, PNR.  The plot is driven by personal Relationship, and it's definitely what I call Intimate Adventure Genre, but I think the real Romance part will develop in what I hope will be a number of sequels.

I found @Dark_Passages on twitter -- I think when they followed me ( @jlichtenberg ) and I looked at the little bio and followed back.  Or I may have gotten an email from the publicist.  I did get a two-page promo for the novel done as a pdf file which I read on my iPod Touch and wrote back and asked for the full novel.

You will note I've been blogging here about the place of social networking in a writer's modern life.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/strange-benefit-of-social-networking.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-cb-radio-come-on-back.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html

 Before I wrote this blog entry, I asked @Amber_Benson (whose byline is Amber Benson ) via public twitter post  if she knew Kathryn Leigh Scott personally.  Amber answered publicly that she knew someone who does know Kathryn and has a very high opinion of her work.  I hope this post will introduce these two extraordinary women.  They really should collaborate! 
 
You might also want to follow the twitter account @Dark_Passages which is how I encountered Kathryn Leigh Scott and ended up with her publisher sending me a review copy of this novel -- which I couldn't wait to read.  They sent me an ARC, I devoured it, and this post is only a few weeks after the publication date.

Dark Passages is written in that very pleasant "voice" that makes you feel good about yourself.  The characters are totally absorbing, the historical background sketched with elegantly chosen detail.

There are no boring sections to this novel.  But it's not an action novel.  It's a story about a very realistic supernatural person, young Meg, on a relentlessly logical karmic path to stardom.  It has one tiny gliche at the end which I won't discuss here because it would be a "spoiler."  But here's a clue -- one scene should have been moved to occur after another scene which should have been much longer and more complex.  Read this book and find that tiny glitch if you can.

Study Dark Passages, find the scenes that should have been in reverse order, and contrast/compare it to the Calliope Reaper-Jones novels which don't have a glitch like that.

Read my series on What's An Editor, and you will see that asking a writer to reverse two scenes is what Editors do for a living.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html


is the final post in that sequence on Editing and has links to the prior ones in the series.

Here's what an editor would see comparing the Calliope Reaper-Jones novels to Dark Passages.

The Reaper-Jones novels have a stronger "action" structure and the action itself provides the plot-driving energy.

Dark Passages has a plot driven by the Relationships, the suspense provided by an enemy stalking the main character because of a generations long vendetta against her family, and by the main character's ability to evoke caring from those she meets.

The flinty, hardened, actors and seasoned Playboy Bunnies, care about Meg, even though they don't know she drinks blood from animals in the park and would suck them dry in a moment were her self-control to fail.

And it seemed to me Meg had no clue how much the people she meets care about her.

She comes from a small-town, growing up on an isolated farm with a warm, caring family.  In fact, her background profile is pretty much like Clark Kent's!

Dark Passages is a heart-melting historical Vampire novel.  You don't want to miss this one.

And if you've missed the Reaper-Jones novels, pick up a copy.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part III

Whew! Now the election's over we can drop politics because it's not important anymore, right? Ooooo. Ummmm. Oy, I don't think so.

CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm not arguing either side of this issue.  I'm examining why the HEA is so universally scoffed at. 

We began in Part I of Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice on October 26, 2010, discussing Glenn Beck and noted:

Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"

And to whom does it matter? And what can we do with that information?

In my blog post "Glenn Beck Did Not Invent The Overton Window" (October 19, 2010, aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com ) I mentioned that I disagree (personally) with some of what Beck is "selling" (and he uses a "hard sell" technique right out of his enemy's playbook). But I don't disagree with all of it.

So what do I disagree with and why should you care?

As I pointed out in the October 19th 2010 post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com Glenn Beck is moving the Overton Window, or trying to, or maybe just doing it inadvertently in response to commercial demands and pressures.

He got the concept of the Overton Window from a Think Tank which got it from some mathematicians researching how to describe the behavior of large numbers of people making decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory
That mathematics is employed by advertisers to make people buy products. It's proven stuff and it works.

The Mackinac Center http://www.mackinac.org/7504 -- uses this math to describe the political behavior of people by the millions while advertising uses it to shape preferences for brands of toothpaste or perfume. There isn't enough profit in novels to afford to hire those folks to sell a novel -- but film producers definitely use their services.

This math is not just statistics, it's a method of changing what the majority hold to be true and unquestioned. It can change what is deemed "politically correct."

And it has.

The entire technique is rooted in a view of the universe based on the "zero-sum-game" -- which is why this branch of mathematics came from and informs game-theory. (which is why video games have become so popular; they depict and infuse the player with the zero-sum-game philosophy).

That the physical universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.

That the social universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.

That the economic universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.

Nowhere in our mainstream, Hollywood films, Manhattan publishing, nowhere in the big money, high capital cost/high profit margin business models do we see evidence of anything but a zero-sum-game model of the universe.

The biggest TV audiences are drawn by sports - and every professional sport is based on the zero-sum-game model of reality. I win means you lose.

I win causes you to lose.

"There Can Be Only One"

In Part II we noted that it seems (to me, and others) that the Socialist and Communist views of the world are based on this zero-sum-game model.

The reason that some people are poor is that other people are rich.

That's connected as cause-effect. The only way that rich people get rich is by taking away from (oppressing) "workers" who work themselves to death for bare subsistence wages and there is no way for these hard working, upstanding, deserving workers to get rich other than to demand justice from the rich who have stolen the product of the worker's sweat and tears.  (That's not all pure fantasy either.  There is proof it has happened, but not that it must be the only way it can ever happen.) 

The theory is that there is a limited amount of "rich" -- You win means I lose.

Well, I won't stand for that. I'm taking your win away from you right now! And that's only justice. I demand justice.

The clear, clean, beyond question obviousness of this point of view is simply irrefutable.

If you are inherently incapable of questioning the unconscious assumption about the nature of reality rooted in the zero-sum-game model, you can not rationally come to any other conclusion than that the rich are rich because they suck the life-juices out of the poor.

The rich are "winners" and the poor are "losers."

Put another way, the poor are "losers" BECAUSE the rich are "winners." AND THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!

It's simply too obvious to be denied by any rational person.

The HEA, the HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending, can not be had by all!

It's pie in the sky. Only certain "chosen" golden children ever dare aspire to happiness, and YOU ARE NOT CHOSEN. Therefore you must fight yourself, using all your energy to subdue your inner self. See the example I found involving oral sex in Part II (posted November 2, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com).

But why is it obvious?

Well, look at marriage, especially through the prism of that item on oral sex in marriage. Look at our most intimate relationships. Look at how parents raise children. Look back on how your parents raised you.

From the child's point of view, "because I said so" is how parents rule -- and parents get their way because they're big.

If parents "negotiate" with a child before the child is really old enough to process all the variables at once, the parent is seen as weak, incompetent, manipulatable, and the child gets an inflated view of Self.

There is a corporate executive training program that companies pay thousands and thousands of dollars to put their trainees and new hires through. The program teaches "YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU DESERVE; YOU GET WHAT YOU NEGOTIATE."

And it teaches the art of negotiation as a form of warfare.

Warfare has always been practiced as a zero-sum-game. Our professional sports are modeled after warfare. Corporate culture is modeled on football.

Our culture has forced us to adopt the zero-sum-game model of the universe by excluding any other style activities from your notice (yes, such activities exist but you are flimflammed into not-noticing or not-recognizing them).

Now look at the dust-up recently on bullying in the school yards and how much damage that does to children that then subsequently shapes their potential as adults.

Parents have come out passionately against bullying in school yards. Teachers and school administrators must stop the bullying - it's the school's responsibility to protect my child against bullies.

But where do bullies come from?

How many really creative people have admitted in biographies that they were bullied, and thus forced to learn a response?

How many chimp studies have examined chimp tribes and bullying, or jockeying for pecking order among say, ducks.

Should we intervene in the society of children to stop bullying?

It's an unexamined assumption among parents that their child must not be bullied.  (which doesn't mean it's wrong; just not thought out carefully)

It's an unexamined assumption among the parents of children that do the bullying that their child is showing leadership potential, a winner's profile, not a loser's profile, and their pride (however secret even from themselves) knows no bounds. WINNER means NOT LOSER.

Why must our children not "be bullied?"

Recent research on mice has shown us a possible chemical mechanism for the end result of having been bullied.

See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 12, 2010 titled GENETIC MECHANISM BY WHICH LOVE CONQUERS ALL

Yeah, we're still on the HEA subject.

The mice that had repeated lost fights with other mice in that experiment showed a later life tendency to be timid, not to fight for their place, and not to explore.

Dissection of their brains revealed a chemical in the submissive mice's brains, wrapped around their genes, that wasn't present in the mice that had not lost the fights. These chemicals wrap around the genes and allow or suppress expression of the genes.

So we have a purely chemical (not spiritual or soul-based) explanation of how it is that kids who are bullied in school yards grow up to become submissive - and don't explore.

"Explore" for a mouse is a kind of boldness.

We're talking about the kind of boldness that makes human beings explore questions, that makes human beings question unconscious assumptions being "sold" to them by clever mathematicians manipulating the Overton Window. To question authority, such as teachers.

Because of human creativity, artistic talent, a lot of bullied kids turn out to be the boldest questioners. Maybe they get bullied because they are artistic?

But most don't turn out to be artists.

Allowing school-yard bullying while assuring the parents "we're doing all we can" (God Forbid anyone in this world should heroically exceed their abilities and actually grow as a person and a hero by doing something they can't do - something outside their job description!) is one of many ways to create a pliable and obedient population.

Allowing schools to teach "the truth" (carefully editing textbooks) keeps children from being confused, feeling threatened, and needing to think before deciding or expressing an opinion.

They grow up to be adults who want "the government" (or someone) to keep them safe.

Since they never learned in school that one of the basic principles that made the USA successful as a country is that the police do not prevent crime, they expect to live in a crime free world where police prevent crime.

However, in principle, the police (and all criminal statutes) are aimed only at people who have actually done criminal deeds -- and thus the police (an arm of government) can act only after the fact, lest government gain power over individuals. That is, the majority must never inhibit the exploration activities of any individual. Freedom of thought, religion, speech - all rests on the concept that the Police must not prevent any activity.

Under no circumstances can any arm of government ever be allowed to prevent anyone from doing anything. Government must not be allowed control.

Yeah, they don't teach that in school any more, but it was a core principle in the civics classes in my grammar school, and today it is a fully examined and questioned assumption of mine -- though it started out as unquestioned.

Today, however, "Crime Prevention" (another sobriquet promulgated by those with a very specific political agenda) is lauded, and when it fails people are so offended they throw out their elected officials who failed to prevent crime.  Remember we're talking about the plausibility of the HEA here.  You can't have happiness if your expectations regarding safety and predictability are not met. 

We're missing a social mechanism that damps down if not prevents aberrant behavior, keeps it at a tolerable level where expectations are mostly met.

Today huge, massively funded federal agencies are devoted to public safety - and to protecting consumers.

The government's role is primarily to protect us (seal the borders, for example). Very often we are being protected from ourselves -- pharmaceuticals legal in Europe can't be sold here because they would undercut the market of some big pharma company here, but we're told we are being protected from potential harm caused by our own bad decisions.

But big corporations are seen as bullies because they're big.

Glenn Beck showed (I caught a quick clip of this channel surfing) a cartoon line-drawing animation that is being shown in schools to instruct kids on the relationship between corporations and government.

The government was shown as a small image, a neat, clean straight line drawing, of I think, a building. The corporation was shown as a huge, round, blown-up quasi-human image -- something like humpty-dumpty is often drawn. Bloated and distorted.

The corporations were noted to be bigger than government, and positioned by artistic composition to be menacing the little government.

Any reasonable person, especially someone bullied as a child, would conclude that government must be grown bigger to face down the ugly big bully corporations. That's how we conquer schoolyard bullies - we grow larger, hit harder or get friends to gang up on them with us. 

This is a truth that becomes internalized as an unquestioned assumption.  Government must grow or the world won't be safe.  (maybe so, but who knows?) 

Worse, the assumption becomes unconsciously processed because of the graphics - and I could see the art of this Overton Window mathematics behind that composition in the cartoon. As I said previously I don't see what most viewers see when I watch TV. This image of the relationship between government and corporations becomes UNQUESTIONABLE TRUTH, not merely an assumption, a hypothesis or a theory subject to revision according to new facts unearthed. 

An assumption can never be called into question because you don't know it's there.

It has been presented to the very young in their own language, the language of the bully in the play yard, and presented to be true by authority in the form of the teacher.

Every time a parent says, "listen to the teacher" "sit still in class" "don't act out" "don't pester the teacher with questions, you'll get bad grades" -- every time a parent reinforces a teacher's authority, the result is more assumptions driven into the child's mind that will become unquestionable assumptions later in life (which might be good if the assumptions stay reliable throughout the child's lifetime). 

Was this done to you?

Are you doing it to your children?

Have you ever had to change any "fact" you learned in school?

Look at this:  http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/11/discovery-pushes-human-tool-use-years/
Every so often, we have to revise what we know to be true.  Are you preparing your children to do that?

What has all that to do with the HEA?

If you live in the world I've described above, you have been taught by these zero-sum-game based philosophical methods that you are not qualified to live the HEA - that it's not realistic to expect your life to reach HEA.  It's not even "right" to try because if you get an HEA life, that means you took it away from someone else! (zero-sum-game - there isn't enough happiness in the world to go around - you win, someone else loses.) 

It's not realistic because not everyone can be a winner.

How do you know that?

Because in that same grammar school class that taught you about big bad corporations, you learned that only some kids in class can get an A, and a few more a B, most will get C's, and a few D's and F's -- or whatever numerical or euphemistic substitute for those grades is used.

The use of euphemisms like "needs improvement" "excels" etc does not mask the fact that it's a zero-sum-game. School is graded on a curve, and eventually we learn what that means. A few are chosen to be winners, and all the rest of us lose because those winners took away our right to win.

There can be only 10% or fewer A's, or "Excels" in a class. Not everybody can "excel" or "excel" means nothing.

Whether they know it or not, all teachers are taught that statistically humans fall on a bell curve and it's their job to sort out the top 10% for college bound.

The rest are "workers." Oppressed, you will see, if you read the first part of this series WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE on October 26, 2010.

The only way you can ever begin to even wonder if any of that is true is to question the assumption that reality is a zero-sum-game, inherently, intrinsically and realistically, there really is only so much good crop land, only so much drinkable water, only so much gold mine country, only so much uranium, only so much zinc, copper, oil, and only so many can be happy.  The only way to be happy is to "win" -- so that means half lose. 

But if you win, you did it by being a bully, so you have to be miserable with what you've won.  Which half of humanity then can have an HEA? 

We have to organize into countries big enough and mean enough to fight and win those critical resources or we will die.

Our big, muscular HE-MAN MEN must "fight for us" and win, so we can be protected to raise our children to fight and win.

It's all about competing and winning. Competition is the only correct way to organize human beings. It brings out the best in us.

We MUST compete with each other, and we must be the winner.  And only winners then get to have children. 

Therefore, if you hold the unconscious assumption (possibly implanted, possibly actually true) that you are not a winner, you have only one logical recourse - rise up and smite the winners and take what they have (i.e. raise taxes on the rich).

In that universe, there can be no HEA for anyone.

If you win Happily Ever After, it won't bring you happiness because you got it by taking it away from someone else. And you know in your heart that the someone you deprived will rise up and take what you took from them.

Why would it bother you that you caused someone pain so you could win? If you didn't snatch what happiness you can, someone else would take it - probably waste it, too. After all, you can do better with resources than others.

If you live in a universe where the only way to satisfy your heart's desire is by preventing someone else from satisfying their heart's desire -- i.e. you have to GET A MAN by "winning" him away from some other woman in a contest of beauty or fellatio, and the only way to hold a man (whether he prefers to be held or not) is by doing something you'd really rather not do because "men can't help it" -- then your happiness is achieved at the expense of someone else's misery.

Now we elevate this discussion to a dimension few are willing to access.

As far as I know, the only universe of discourse where the zero-sum-game assumption about reality can be questioned (not dispensed with, just questioned) is the universe where the Soul is real.

The part of you that prevents you from exulting totally in causing others misery is what we call the Soul.

OK, maybe SPIRIT. Conscience?

Maybe some other term applies. But it's a non-tangible, immortal part of Self that matters more than "here and now" because its joy and its pain is eternal. It's the part of you that's miserable when you lose, and can't be happy when you win because that means someone else lost.  It's the non-sportsman in you.  It's where your Charity comes from, where your Hope and Joy reside. 

And there is some part of every human's awareness that connects to that dimension.

But that connection is like a switch. It's not always open. Sometimes it rusts shut.

In my personal philosophy, judging whether that rusted-shut switch's condition is good or bad for you is above my pay grade.  I just use it in characterization.

I think there are people who need to be cut off from their awareness of the existence of their Soul, Spirit or whatever you want to call it, at least for part of their life.

There are people who need to be fully in touch. Sometimes switch's rust can be dissolved by Love.

Most people are sporadically and partially aware, or just aspire to repeat moments of contact through an open connection.

Whoever you are and however you are, you're just fine. You'll change when you're ready - opening or closing that contact as you need to in order to accomplish your purposes in life and beyond.

My attitude is, it's none of my business. I have enough on my own plate.

But given the notion that there exists such a thing as a non-material part of a human being, the whole "model of the universe" thing changes.

The worlds you can, as a writer, build to tell stories in become richer, deeper, more complex, harder to handle, but ever so much more realistic (to me anyway).

If the Soul is real, there may in fact be SOUL MATES -- in which case, the HEA becomes an inevitable end-point for each of us, not a ridiculous fantasy that's not "realistic."

If you live your life wearing blinders, refusing to question the zero-sum-game model of the universe because answers would be dangerous, confusing, or doom you to being a loser, then you don't dare accept the HEA except as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy achievable in real life only by the chosen few, and then only temporarily.

If you live your life totally aware of your own Soul, and can see the Soul behind the eyes of others, and know there is a Divine Spirit somehow intimately interacting with this world and your personal life, then when you get to the HEA in a novel that reflects the particular Soul hypothesis you are using, you are emotionally satisfied.

If you live your life putting your blinders on to function in a corporate environment, in the world of science, and peeking around them during your family time, then quickly taking them off for an hour once a week to worship, then the HEA will attract you, reassure you, seem somehow RIGHT, but it's just a novel. Real life is not so simple. But you'll never stop striving for your own happiness without taking it away from others.

Awareness of Soul makes people unable to tolerate being the agent of deprivation and pain to others.

Now, it's true, many people who scoff at the notion of Soul and are committed to explaining all human behavior with brain chemistry and science, people who have been successful commanding the Overton Window to move to where they want it, are equally unable to tolerate being the agent of pain to others.

In fact, MOST of the people involved in "Progressive" or "Liberal" causes, helping the poor, running free clinics, fighting AIDs in Africa, bravely standing up to corporate bullies with Green Peace ships are purely motivated to alleviate human suffering everywhere once and for all and forever.

And frankly, I'd stand with them, put my life on the line with them. I hold nothing back from these causes. They are my causes and always have been. Green energy, anti-global warming measures, reducing our collateral ecological damage -- walking softly in the world, caring for our environment, all of that is core principle with me.

But how many of them are fighting with all their might because they see the world as a zero-sum-game while at the same time feeling their Souls aching for the unfortunate, the poor, and the victims of corporate greed (which is also very real).

How many of them have a good solid plan for what they'll do when they've WON and thus caused someone else to lose? 

On the one hand, you feel your Soul, you know it's real.

On the other hand, you feel your Body, and you know you must fight for the resources to stay alive.

Something is telling you it isn't right, it isn't just, that some people don't have and it's up to everyone to keep all humans safe.

You demand your HEA and won't give up your zero-sum-game fight-and-win scenario.

There's a High Concept film in that conundrum. Think about it.

Turn around now and take another look at politics.

My stand on politics is that no politician should ever be allowed to hold public office.

The steering decisions for a whole country, state, even county, should not be made by compromise. You can't find the right answer to a problem by partially giving up a principle.

I don't want anyone fighting for me, or fighting for my rights, or my anything.

You can't get anything worth having by winning.

So what do you do instead?

Become more interested in what is right rather than who is right.

Argue until you, cooperatively as a group, figure out a right answer. (not THE right answer - there are lots of right answers, usually only a very few really wrong ones)

Govern by consensus not compromise?  That's never yet worked, though compromise has sputtered along for the 200 years or so the USA has used it.  We need to think some more.  

The problem is this Overton Window thing that allows a few people to manipulate consensus to be what they want it to be. So everyone has to be armored against unconscious assumptions in grammar school, trained to be very aware of their personal philosophy but knowing theirs isn't any better or worse than anyone else's.

We'd have to immunize our children to the Overton Window.  It would take a new philosophy.  (Isn't that what SF/F writers are supposed to be doing?) 

Some philosophies though, are more effective and efficient at producing an HEA style life.  Fiction exploring the possibilities could be a "pen mightier than the sword" moment for humanity. 

Think of the Blind Men And The Elephant. The men are all correct, all have an opinion that isn't the truth, but they won't know it until they stop fighting and start cooperating to create the total holographic, 3-dimensional image from all the fragmented points of view.

Right now, we don't combine our philosophies, we fight to win by cramming our philosophy down someone else's throat.

The zero-sum-game assumptions require that we must fight.

Look again at this entire election process and the results, scrutinize everything that's being said, everything "they" are making you feel, and try to see how to question the underlying zero-sum-game philosophical assumption they are cramming down your throat.

Ask yourself who benefits if you swallow their assumption that all life is fighting and not everyone can win.

Now think about all the discussions we've had about Love, and how Love Conquers All isn't just a novel theme, it's actually true about real reality.

Love is the most powerful binding force in the universe.

If the universe is constructed in such a way that Love Conquers All, how can it possibly be a zero-sum-game?

If "All" is conquered, there is only one winner -- ALL.

What is "all"? - it includes you but is not limited to you.

You see why I don't want politicians fighting for me? The more fighting, the less Love.

Fighting doesn't conquer anything, least of all All.

You can't win by fighting, just as you can't get rid of starfish in your clam beds by cutting the starfish in half and throwing the halves back in the water.  The more you fight, the more enemies you have. 

When you start to fight, you lose. If you win, you're miserable because you caused someone else misery. If you lose, you're miserable because you don't have what you went after.

It's the zero-sum-game model of the universe that causes people to reject the HEA, to be unable to feel the emotion generated by novels that lead, however logically, to the HEA.

The zero-sum-game model of the universe has become an unquestionable assumption at the bottom level of our subconscious minds.  You don't even know you believe it, or how it limits your actions. 

To gain acceptance for the HEA, artists must successfully challenge the zero-sum-game philosophy by worldbuilding with Fire and Ice.

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

Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice Part I Failure of Imagination Part IV

Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice Part I
Failure of Imagination Part IV

Politics is surely fire, especially in the run-up to an Election.

Philosophy is surely ice, especially in the run-up to an Election.

Mix in pair-bonding in any variety or style, especially if you include Soul Mates which implies some dimension of spirituality, immortality, possibly reincarnation - i.e. a larger point to your life than is apparent in this life itself --

Stand back and just admire the mushroom cloud.

And that tall mushroom cloud creates the potential for a huge audience "reach."

But you (the writer) have to make the mushroom cloud comprehensible as a mushroom cloud.

You have to show-don't-tell your readership and audience that it's beautiful and captivating and they should just sit back and enjoy the show.

How, exactly, does a writer do that? How does a reader become a writer?

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/are-commercial-writers-born-or-made.html
What is the transformative moment when the passive person who just imbibes and enjoys fiction becomes the active creator and purveyor of that inner pleasure we all know but can't name (probably because English doesn't have a word, or the word has fallen into disuse).

As I've explained and explored in a number of posts, the key ingredient in the writer's craft tool box is philosophy.

That's why it's so hard to explain to a new writer what a "Concept" actually is (as opposed to an Idea For A Story) and how to identify a "High" concept.  A High Concept is that cap on the mushroom cloud mentioned above.  At that moment of recognition: "My Idea Is Actually A High Concept" a reader may be spurred to write, if not become a writer.  Very often a reader sees a novel they are reading as a movie -- or a movie as a novel -- or a TV show as missing a "story" (hence fanfiction). 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html

The artist's job, role in "society" is to translate the abstract into the concrete, to make theory visible, to make aspirations and dreams tangible, to give the customer a whiff of what life on Earth will be like when they reach "success" (whatever that might be for the individual) -- which for us means the elusive HEA.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html  

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html
Right now, the USA has returned to a knife-edge balance, half passionately convinced that one philosophy is the only honorable and true philosophy, and the other half convinced that the opposite philosophy is the one and only honorable and true philosophy. A hefty percentage of the electorate stands in the middle of this half-and-half split, convinced that neither side is right, but both sides are right.

Few, if any, are doubting or questioning what they "know" to be true.

Leaders, entertainers, and information vendors (i.e. "news") are using every sophisticated tool in their toolboxes to sell their ideas, to convince a lot more people that this one idea is correct.  But they aren't thinking in terms of Concept - the highest crest of that mushroom cloud that can be seen from afar. 

Read again this description of High Concept and why it serves so well to convey Idea to so many.

http://www.blakesnyder.com/2006/02/02/the-death-of-high-concept/ 

Read Sarah Beach's comment of Sept 9th on that page where she says:

---SARAH BEACH----
I’ve always felt that High Concept was like seeing a line of mountains on the horizon. You know exactly what is in front of you, and even at a distance, you can see the main features of it. Low Concept was like a rolling landscape where features are hidden, waiting to surprise you.
Notice that High Concept can also have surprises in the detail (like hidden canyons and rivers). But you still have a very clear idea of what you’re heading into.
-----END QUOTE-----

Or you can think of it as the top of that huge mushroom cloud formed by the explosive force of Fire and Ice, Politics and Philosophy. 


But there are some whose work is extremely effective and efficient who are indeed thinking in terms of Concept rather than Idea. 

My blog post on October 19, 2010, "Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window"...

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
...flicked past this issue which I'm going to explore now from the point of view of the Failure of Imagination preventing the popularization of the Happily Ever After concept of real life.

See my post FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART III, September 28, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
Failure of Imagination Part II is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html

Part I is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html

Where Imagination has Failed is in questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality.

We saw in Where Expert Romance Writers Fail that when asked, ordinary people say the reason they refuse to read "Romance genre" novels is that the HEA isn't "realistic" or is a requirement of the genre that just does not satisfy them in their hunt for an emotional payoff.

We discussed that "emotional payoff" problem referring to a blog post by an SFR writer reviewed on thegalaxyexpress.net chaffing at the "restriction" of the HEA requirement for storytelling.

See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on September 21, 2010 titled "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA"

From our point of view the HEA is not a restriction or formulaic requirement but the natural, inevitable, unavoidable point at which "the story" is over. Until you get to the HEA, you haven't finished the story. Would you think you'd finished having sex if you didn't finish?

From our point of view, it's inconceivable that anyone could possibly even think, nevermind actually say, that the HEA is a recipe for boredom.

But that's a point of view, not a fact of life.

It's hard to understand how it might be possible for anyone to fail to understand that the HEA is NOT a "fact of life."

But that's what writers (artists of all stripes) do for a living. Understand the alien. Explain it.

We have to put yourselves into the mind of "other" people - people who really do live in "alien" universes, who look out of their eyes and do not see what we see.

We have to be able to understand how different people see the world, then create a piece of art that explains one kind of people's views to the other kind of people.

What kinds? Men. Women. Gay. Bi. Rich. Poor. Democrat. Republican. Independent. Christian. Muslim. Hindu. Jew. Human. Non-human. (WRITING EXERCISE: extend that list to 10 more kinds of viewpoints.)

Take any category from that list, and explain it to another category.

To achieve that explanation, you will find yourself grappling with politics, philosophy, religion, sexuality, morality, ethics, -- all manner of intangibles that must be made tangible in order to tell the story.  Show Don't Tell. 

To present that story, you must worldbuild.

You must create the "world" that one kind sees that the other kind does not see, and create it in show-don't-tell so that it can be understood by those who can't see it, won't believe it if they do, and must suspend disbelief to enter the story.

Neither one of those worlds will be your own world (most of the time).

But your own world, your point of view on reality, your essential take on Creation, The Soul, Evolution, Justice, Ethics, Morals, will show through.

Not only can you not help it - you should not help it, because that show-through is the carrier wave of your own ART. It's your "voice" - the thing that makes you distinctive as a writer.

OK, now back to the "real" world.

It has been noted any number of places, the Glenn Beck show in particular in 2010, that in the last 50 years or so, the "Liberal" political viewpoint has become utterly dominant in Hollywood.

There was a whiff of Liberalism in "Hollywood" in the 1950's which sparked the Witch Hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy - if you're too young to have studied the McCarthy Hearings in school, go google it up. Hold your nose and read carefully.

McCarthy was right - Communists and proto-Communists and pre-Socialists, and people who were generally critical of and obstinately against many of the values held most dear in the USA during the 1800's had begun infiltrating the entertainment media.  Or perhaps the entertainment media had summoned them because they had a High Concept to display. 

Being writers, creative types, they re-invented the entire vocabulary by which their vision of how a country should organize its economy and government could be discussed, a vocabulary of images and characters, of symbols. They renamed philosophies without changing the tenants much. They set out to use their artistic skills to change the "image" of the then-demonized philosophies.

Three generations later, according to Glenn Beck, they've succeeded. He's made a huge fortune exploiting the absolute lack of his point of view in the media.  He has hit on a High Concept and tickled imaginations into gear with it.  Remember, this man is an actor who got his start in comedy, exploiting his ADD tendencies to advantage, and never lets you forget he's a recovering alcoholic.  He's a performer who presents himself as an overgrown child, but does that in and of itself totally invalidate what he's saying?  After all, he employs 40 researchers in addition to the Fox News resources.  His imagination hasn't failed.  And he's making money from it.  He's holding out, as a carrot on a stick, the inkling of a suspicion that the HEA might be possible in real life, and it's making him a fortune. 

Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"

CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet.  I'm a writer.  I build worlds to ask entertaining questions.  You have to do the answering. 

If you let yourself get all wound up in Glenn Beck's politics, you'll never be able to discern the mechanism he's using behind that smokescreen.  So take a few deep breaths, cool off (yeah, it's hard, but being a writer is not an easy life), and study the phenomenon Beck has created with his High Concept. 

That's the kind of phenomenon we need to create for the HEA driven fiction that is the core of the Romance and SFR and PNR genres. 


Part II of Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice next week.

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