This is a lesson on the business of writing in our everyday world (very much the topic , but contributes much to Colby Hodge's discourse on When A Story Doesn't Work, and how the craft of writing blends into the Business of Writing
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/when-story-doesnt-work-part-two.html
as well as the issue of "worldbuilding" of a fictional world, and also references the Expository Lump problem writers face. Oh, this is a long post covering a lot of territory.
And the point of all this rambling and muttering over many, many posts here focusing on the real world (on a blog about Alien Romance) is to gather the necessary data to figure out why Romance in general and Alien Romance in particular is not regarded with the respect we feel it should garner and what we can do about that.
We all love our fiction, but few readers, game players, movie goers, video-watchers -- i.e. fiction consumers -- still think in terms of how the creators of their entertainment can make a living good enough to keep on producing top notch entertainment.
As I discussed last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
(where I beg you to go read the comments that correct a mis-statement on my part!)
the business model of most industrial revolution businesses is busted, and some new thing is coalescing out of the shards of our civilization's economy.
Those who properly divine what that new thing is, how it works, why it works, will be making the new founding fortunes of this century and probably the next. Very few have yet figured out just how profound the shattering of the foundations of our economy is at this moment.
But one SF writer may have a grip on explaining it. C. J. Cherryh.
C. J. Cherryh's marvelous SF novels (with a good dash of alien romance) showcase her talents at their best in her FOREIGNER series. The latest is CONSPIRATOR, and it's book #10 which will likely be the first of another trilogy in the series. Series composed of trilogies seem to be all the rage again.
Read those 10 novels (preferably in order) just for the sheer pleasure of a good story -- a refreshing joy to read such a well written, good story about what I like to read about (smart people caught in impossible predicaments, plights, and stymied by cognitive dissonance).
Put in perspective, those 10 novels give you a vision of our own society from the point of view of the anthropologist. It works better than studying anthroplogy in college courses though - because it is the application of the basic principles of the interface between science, technology, and culture to a Situation (Cherryh is the best in the biz at Situation).
The world C. J. Cherryh is working with is a human colony isolated on the world of the Atevi. Atevi are so similar to us, sex is possible, but "love" is a word that applies to a salad not a person. Atevi are driven by emotions about 45 degrees off the direction of human emotions. Not opposite, not at right angles, but skewed in a dizzying way.
Atevi are more herd creatures than humans are. But not really. They're just Alien.
It takes many novels to let Cherryh draw us into the mindset of these alien creatures. Cherryh is an expert at avoiding the expository lump, yet the narrative goes on and on about the multi-axis Atevi political situation. There's a little repetition, but it provides emphasis, points you might miss if you were skimming. While you're reading about what seems to be completely comprehensible politics, in fact boring politics, you're actually learning to look at reality from an alien point of view.
These long political analyses seem to be expository lumps, but they aren't. They move the story along quite briskly, setting up the action even in future novels. If you are following the anthropology and commentary on humanity, you see things beyond the politics.
Yes, it's an intellectual exercise, but that's what SF delivers as part of the pleasure.
In the FOREIGNER series, Cherryh has also recently introduced other aliens "out there" among the stars, and they're very likely to make their first visit to the Atevi homeworld too soon, so all the Atevi politics has to do with preparing for that eventuality. Meanwhile, the main character is a human whose job is to see to it that human technology does not destroy Atevi culture with potential world war as a result (the Atevi don't do "war" -- but they fight and assassinate a lot).
And here I go inserting exposition into this discourse on the Business Model of Writing.
See my blog post on expository lumps at:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html
Reading this 10th Foreigner novel right after writing last week's post about the massive shift in the "business model" that isn't confined to publishing, gave me a different take on just how dire this culture-quake we're in may become.
This week's news is once again about North Korea rattling atomic bombs at us, and all about the cooperation between North Korea and Iran and the arms race that's being unleashed into a ferment of cultural-warfare (which is what this whole Terrorist thing is about; the culture generated by certain religious outlooks). Meanwhile, the USA is facing the legalization of gay marriage which seems a dire and horrifyingly revolting change to some and pure justice to others. It's cultural change.
Cherryh starts CONSPIRATOR with the basic problem being a speech that Bren Cameron, our human POV character who is translator between human and atevi, has to write trying to stop the atevi from adopting cell phones.
The rest of the novel illustrates why the Atevi must adopt cell phones, and why they must not! It ends with the speech unwritten and undelivered. I expect that speech to be a roaring occasion for violence in the halls of the Atevi legislature.
Today's multi-function cell phones are web-access instruments, wireless windows on everywhere. The newest features give you direct access to facebook, twitter, and other social networking tools.
So when you talk cell phone, you talk Web 2.0 -- which means you're talking about the force that is pulverizing the industrial revolution business model, bureaucracy and even democracy itself -- certainly pulverizing capitalism! Perhaps destroying our cultures even more traumatically than the human technology leaks are destroying Atevi culture.
Pulverizing our culture just as a sound wave pulverizes kidney stones.
Most Americans don't even know what culture is. Can you point to your culture? Which pocket do you carry it in? What ringtones have you downloaded into your culture?
We have the TV Show REAPER where parents sold their son's soul to the Devil -- and this season ends with the boy's girlfriend selling her soul to the Devil on the chance of getting her boyfriend's soul free.
A whole, very successful TV show about the SOUL - but can you point to your soul?
It's like "air" was say, a thousand years ago. You don't know it's there because you live in it. It took science a long time (and a lot of computers and satelites) to get a model of weather that's almost working! It's hard to study something you're inside of.
The book I best like for conveying a concept of "what" your culture is, so you can look inside yourself and find it (trust me; it's there somewhere) is
But like souls and air, you miss your culture only when it's GONE.
So we all know the term culture-shock but most Americans who have never lived isolated abroad (with no American community and no one who even speaks British English around) simply don't know what "a" culture is, nevermind their own.
And that's why alarm has not been more pervasive in the USA as our culture crumbles. We don't know it's there, can find no use for it or value to it, and we just don't care.
But we should. Global Warming is nothing compared to this.
You can barely see the cracks in the foundations of our culture yet, but one of those cracks is the downfall of our huge 19th and 20th century corporations. General Motors going bankrupt practically on the 100th anniversary is just one example of failed business model, a surface crack caused by a movement in the foundation underneath our CULTURE.
And C. J. Cherryh has explained what's happening today in an SF novel ostensibly about alien politics, the 10th in a series. Yes, you can read it as the first novel you read in the Foreigner universe, but I've been reading them in order as published, and I see bits and pieces of information I'm using that I picked up in each of the previous novels.
The whole set of 10 Foreigner novels makes this image of our culture under attack by our technology so clear.
Start with the first in the series here:
Now let's skip all the way back into "reality" -- and refer to the series of posts I've done here on Web 2.0 (read them in the following order if you haven't already)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/blogging-and-reading-and-blogging-oh-my.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-cb-radio-come-on-back.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/urban-fantasy-job-hunting.html
You see? All this is adding up to something, and giving you a view of the gears-and-chips inside the writer's mind.
This is how a writer thinks, and what a writer has to think with, the reasoning laid out like a beginning Algebra student has to write out each step of the solution to a problem with liberal application of imagination.
So far as I know, only a few SF writers have twigged to what is going on beneath our feet, in the vast unconscious of the human species, because of technology.
In past posts and in my review column
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/
I've surveyed the trend toward depicing "reality" as a thin film over a seething cauldron of EVIL. That portrayal of the world is so popular now, you can barely sell anything that doesn't express that philosophy.
Here, in an article in Wired magazine, you may find the reason WHY you can't sell any other kind of fiction lately -- or when you do, it plays to a very narrow audience that leaps for joy over it because it's such a wonderful breath of fresh air.
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism
My previous post on Wired can be found here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/04/wired-magazine-for-romance.html
The social networking and Web 2.0 developments I have been talking about in the above linked posts are barely the tip of the iceburg.
The banner headline for this article in Wired says:
----------------
THE NEW SOCIALISM: Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter aren't just revolutions in online social media. They're the vanguard of a cultural movement. Forget about state ownership and five-year-plans. A global collectivist society is coming -- and this time you're going to like it.
----------------
Frankly, I'm not so sure about the "like it" part which may just be the "slant" of this particular magazine. But this article fingers something very important about what's happening, and C. J. Cherryh's latest novel, CONSPIRATOR, describes that very thing from an alien perspective which makes it more comprehensible (as Spock added the alien POV to Star Trek and let us see ourselves from the outside).
But if the panicing Chinese (and other country's) attempts to "block the internet" -- to dictate what Google links will or will not work if you're inside their blackout curtain -- definitely bespeaks a deeply spooked humanity.
This Web 2.0 development may be even worse for humanity than Cherryh depicts it is likely to be for the Atevi. (oh, I do wish everyone had read the whole Foreigner series to date! This is all part of the STAR TREK discussion I haven't gotten to yet.)
The A-bomb proliferation race breaking out may just be part of this sense of panic set off by the forces described in this article in Wired (you can read it free online).
The totalitarian governments have the knee-jerk response of trying to "control" these new technologies, keeping them away from the poor peasants who would use them to overthrow centralized government control. Control is of course absolutely necessary. Humans can't exist without our betters controlling us. We all know that.
Why just look at the mess in society because we gave up the arranged marriage. Control is necessary, you see, and everything is getting out of control!
I don't know where to start telling you about this article "The New Socialism" in Wired Magazine. Every three or four paragraphs I put a post-it note onto the text to remind me to quote it at you, but this little essay is already too long.
The article quotes a book, HERE COMES EVERYBODY by Clay Shirky, from which the article takes a 4-part division to help sort through the effects of social media.
It targets work, how you get paid for what you contribute, and how people get access to what you've created with your work.
It doesn't harp nearly enough on the cultural aspects of the changes in these economic foundations of society. (A culture and a Society are not the same thing. Different societies can share a culture and do just fine relating to each other. What's happening because of Web 2.0 is that the cultures themselves are being pulverized.)
The culture generates the economy (think about Moslem law being the foundation of their banking system -- it seems to be working for them). The economy generates a zillion societies. Take a "society" to be just a group of people who agree on a certain set of laws -- like driving on the right, not having a King but a President, protecting property rights of the individual from the government, rule of the majority strictly limited to protect the individual)
We're currently trying to extend our "social contract" to include healthcare for everyone. Corporations discovered it's economically advantageous to provide healthcare for workers -- they work more consistently and productively. So now "society" wants to model itself on corporations and declare a social profit to having everyone healthy. Do you see any holes in that, other than trying to pay for it?
Our culture says "be kind to the less fortunate" -- our society says, "health is a right not a privelege," and our economy says, "I'm dying!"
Where do writers fit in all this?
COPYRIGHT!!!!
That's right, copyright is dead. Really. It's been uninvented, and the law hasn't caught up with the CULTURAL VALUE CHANGE that has left the old industrial revolution values pulverized.
Quick, GOOGLE creative commons, and see what turns up. The Wired article sites Creative Commons and GNU licenses as the newly invented concept, (ethical platform) replacing copyright.
http://creativecommons.org/ is only the beginning of what you'll find. Check the Wiki entry, since this Wired article sites WIKI as an example of the new economy.
A whole new set of ethics underlies this new culture. I mean really pulverizing all the unconscious assumptions implanted in our cultures since the 1600's and the invention of the printing press and the business model of publishing (which didn't start as a for-profit business, you know. You have read Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain series, particularly Borne in Blood - where St. Germain owns a printing business in Amsterdam, I think it is.)
In fact, the internet and the web are forces unleashed into our world that are as huge or maybe more huge than the printing press was in its time.
I've been on a number of panels at conventions about how evil the copyright laws are.
This article in Wired takes that to a whole new level.
The writer's business model is based on COPYRIGHT. Or it has been.
That business model is still functioning, but about as well as General Motors was functioning in say, 1990. Lehman Brothers did pretty well in the 1990's. They seized what appeared to be the new business model (securitizing home mortgages). It killed them.
These behemouths are corporations. Each individual writer is a corporation -- whether you incorporate or not (writers are legally allowed to incorporate and make their corporation the owner of their books. Several revisions of the law ago, this was the best deal you could get on your income taxes as a writer. That's why you see some books copyrighted by some corporation that almost sounds like the author's name.)
Alongside the writer's business model of the 1600's, we now see the business model described in this article in Wired as an application of a principle in the book "Here Comes Everybody" -- 1. Sharing, 2. Cooperation, 3. Collaboration, 4. Collectivism -- and this blog post is an example of the new business model. I'm writing. You're not paying me unless you link to this blog entry in a post of your own, mention it on some popular blog comment space, twitter it, digg it, I don't know what all.
Think about what I said about Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock in this post:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
The human brain can make only so much change in a lifetime, make only so many decisions in a day, -- we have a hard-wired physical limit.
Think about historically what happened to the American Slaves abducted from their slow-changing culture in Africa and then systematically stripped of their culture here, to break their Will so they'd make good workers. They borrowed, desperately preserved, and just plain invented a new culture. A few decades ago, the novel and TV miniseries ROOTS explained to a vast majority just what they'd lost and where to go to find it again. The result has been a black President of the United States (who couldn't be proud of that accomplishment!)
That black President though had a father whose parents and grandparents had not had their culture stripped from them.
Humans need that multi-generational cultural grounding. It is our strength.
The internet and the Web have riven our generations apart, like a hot knife through butter.
The young people today are starting to live in exactly the world "The New Socialism" by Christoph Neimann describes.
The older folk, and even not-so-older folk, RESIST. E-book readers, high-tech phones, twitter, (follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/JLichtenberg ) myspace, flickr.
The Google email spam sorting mechanism is a perfect example of the exact kind of "socialism" the article talks about. We, the people, decide what is and is not spam by our votes.
Now, why is it that I am so at home in this new world, while others my age don't even have a computer, nevermind social network memberships, RSS feed reader (I use Feed Demon), friendfeed and other aggregators. I'm using 2 different aggregators for Twitter and haven't found the one I really want, yet. I don't text much, but I would gladly if I were dragged away from my desk more. I text people's phones from my desktop instead.
Why? How is it that I DO ALL THIS? And blog too. There are so many people so much younger than I am who just don't.
Why am I undaunted by Web 2.0? Why do I feel that the advent of all this culture pulverizing tech is not at all disturbing? Why don't I resist it? What's different about me?
Three guesses, and the first two don't count!
I grew up in FANDOM!!!! I was in 7th grade when I wrote my first letter to the editor of an SF magazine, and they published it (with my snailmail address -- something that could never happen today; it was a much safer world back then).
My parents' mailbox became stuffed with dozens, then hundreds of letters from fans all over the USA. I had just learned to type, and I learned that in "fandom" typing was more intimate than handwriting, and if you didn't type a letter you had to explain for at least 3 paragraphs why your typer was broken.
That's a CULTURE. Fandom had it's own language (fanspeak) just as texting today has developed a condensed spelling shorthand.
In fandom, it was rude to address anyone, but especially someone older than you, by their last name. In fandom, culture demanded not only first names but NICKNAMES - fan names.
"fandom" is a kingdom, (fan = fanatic dom = domain as in Kingdom) floating amongst the real world, above it, interspersed with it, but having no fixed geographic location. The fannish calendar is divided into before and after Worldcon (which used to be Labor Day weekend, but now it too floats dates). Worldcon = World Science Fiction Convention. Most conventions (not CONFERENCES!!) have the infix "con" in them somewhere, if only by allusion.
I'm on a mailing List (an email List; an entire concept made obsolete by Web 2.0 but still existing and growing) for the Las Vegas SF fandom organizations. Recently a new member joined and a veteran Fan, Arnie Katz, sent the new member the following welcome message which may give you some idea of "what" fandom is (other than what you think it is if you joined after fandom moved online).
-----------FROM ARNIE KATZ on VegasSFAssociation@yahoogroups.com ----------------
I saw your premiere post on the VSFA listserv and thought I would drop you a note of welcome and introduction.
I'm not big on writing autobiographies, but let me attempt one so you at least know who is talking to you. I'm a 62-year-old professional writer and editor, married to Joyce Worley, also a professional writer and editor. I'm from New York, she comes from Missouri and we moved here in 1989. I've worked in a number of fields, including science fiction/fantasy, popular culture, collecting and collectibles, video and computer gaming, sports, adult and professional wrestling.
Joyce and I met in Fandom in the mid 1960's. She was a leading fan in St. Louis (she chaired a worldcon and got a Hugo nomination for her fanzine) and I was similarly well-known in New York. Hyndreds of pages of correspondence led to Joyce moving to New York and we got together pretty much upon her arrival.
Fandom is kind of a busman's holiday for us, as it is for many creative people. We're known for our writing and publishing for Fandom. I was chosen as the number one fan in the world in 2009 as well as the hobby's best writer.
Enough about me... Let me tell you a little about the entity that you have just encountered, Fandom.
Fandom arose in the late 1920's, born in the letter columns of the professional science fiction magazines. The people who filled those letter columns began writing to each other directly, easily done in an era in which such letters carried full addresses.
The first fanzines appeared around 1930 and the field quickly grew and evolved. The earliest fanzines were little more than blurbs for upcoming prozines. The hobby slowly progressed from a fixation on the stories and authors to an interest in discussing the idea contained in the stories. During the 1940's, that stretched to include ideas not derived from specific stories, but which seemed "scientifictional." By the early 1950's, though, Fandom embraced talking about anything under the sun, including personal experiences and Fandom itself. That's pretty much where the hobby is today.
The current incarnation of Las Vegas Fandom dates from 1989 and the formation of SNAFFU (Southern Nevada Area Fantasy Fiction Union), the city's formal, open SF club. SNAFFU (and Las Vegas Fandom) broke out of its isolation when they met Joyce and I. We introduced them to the like-minded folks around the world and Vegas Fandom has prospers ever since.
There are two other clubs in town, VSFA is by far the smallest, little more than a video-watching group. They're nice enough, but very mundane and pretty much uninterested in the creative side of Fandom. VSFA, through a cooperative arrangement among the three clubs, puts on the annual Halloween Party.
Las Vegrants is the largest fan group in town with two to three times as many members as the other two groups combined. It's an informal, invitation group that includes the city's top fans, many of whom are professional writers and editors.
I'm pretty much the answer man around here, so please feel free to ask any, and as many, questions as you may have about all this strangeness. To get you rolling, I'm including a copy of the second edition of THE TRUFAN'S ADVISOR, a little guide that I turned out a year or so ago. It should be fairly helpful.
Don't hesitate to contact me if there is anything I can do.
Faanishly,
Arnie Katz
----------------------------------
Over the years, I've welcomed many mundanes into fandom and I've had to teach them the inherent values of fandom which I learned in 7th grade and have lived ever since. If you read a fanzine, even if you paid for a hardcopy, you only paid for ink, printing and postage, and you owe a LoC (Letter of Comment). That's true of blog posts too -- you PAY for any post you find valuable by dropping a comment.
Barter is coin of the realm in fandom. You get something good - you give something. Your words, your coolie labor collating a fanzine (minding a website), your thoughts, your arguments, your publicizing a convention by mentioning it on big blogs, or as Arnie here above has offered, his ANSWERS for a neofan. Perhaps the best thing you can do for a blog you love is to "follow" it by RSS or subscribe because there are aggregators out there that position a blog in their search results according to how many subscribers it has.
So the coin of the realm has a new design, but the principle hasn't changed. As ever, coin of the realm today is your words, and your LoCs are more valued than you know until you've gotten one on something you wrote.
The LoC comment can be critical, lambasting the author for any number of errors or omissions, even typos -- but the praise garnered in LoCs is important too. Fanspeak has a name for that praise; egoboo -- a boost to the ego. It's food for the ego, and for the culture of fandom as a whole. Praise for one person's accomplishments feeds the ambition of others to contribute accomplishments. It's not boot-licking or toadying to praise a blog post or web page. It's contributing to the new Culture 2.0.
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about fandom is that it has no government, needs no government, but is not "ungoverned" -- it isn't an anarchy, but it can't tolerate "organization" as a top-down-management style except in small endeavors like, perhaps an ad hoc committee putting on a convention.
Now that Arnie has introduced you to fandom, go read that article in WIRED.
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism
If you understand fandom, and read this article -- you will see that this "new socialism" is actually not so new. It's not an 'ism. It's a 'dom. Webdom maybe.
If you understand C. J. Cherryh's FOREIGNER universe, the Atevi culture, and why human technology is such a threat, you will understand that the magnitude of the threat to our current world from this growing "The New Socialism" collectivist society is so pulverizing, and especially pulverizing to the business model writers have used since the 1600's.
NOW TO STAR TREK.
And no, I'm still not going to talk about the new movie or the script or acting or directing etc.
It's the IMPACT of Trek on our CULTURE.
Remember THE PRIME DIRECTIVE -- and then think about the Atevi.
Now look back on history and see how fandom, and our world has changed under the impact of Trek.
OK, Trek hit in the late 1960's, and the 1970's are famous for Women's Lib and of course the rise of Black Culture after Roots in 1977. In 1975 my non-fiction book STAR TREK LIVES! was published and blew the lid on Star Trek Fandom -- and fandom in general.
The Star Trek conventions were about getting together to meet the people you'd only snailmailed before -- to brainstorm ST fanzine stories, to tell stories, to buy and sell and exchange paper fanzines, and little by little, a track of programming was added (well attended but not the heart of the matter) where the stars of the TV show stood on stage and later signed autographs.
The ST cons were modeled after (and run by BNF's Big Name Fans) SF cons, but that proved to be non-scalable, so the structure gradually evolved to be big enough for the crowds.
So LITTLE ST Cons popped up, just for 'zines, costumes, how-to-run-a-con practice and so on.
Star Trek took the CULTURE of SF fandom and scaled it up, filling fanzines with more than just articles and as Arnie says "life and life in fandom." SF fandom used 'zines the way most people today use blogs, for the meta-conversation. But Star Trek fandom injected FICTION into the fanzines, and sold those zines for paper and postage only, no labor charge.
That's the model Christoph Neimann is describing in his article, calling it a "new socialism" -- but it's neither new nor socialism. It's FANDOM!!! Star Trek style.
Now back to the envelope subject of this whole series of blog posts that's probably bored away the entire readership of this co-blog.
HOW DO WE DO IT FOR SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE????
We must study how culture evolved, (or as C. J. Cherryh said in CONSPIRATOR -- adjusted) to accomodate the new forms of communication.
Fandom evolved from the SF magazine readerships, readers meeting in micro-cons in New York. Star Trek fandom likewise started in and around New York.
What is going on now that has allowed SFR and PNRomance to get a toe-hold is e-books and e-media and Web 2.0 devices like http://www.goodreads.com .
What is happening in the world today, this whole pulverizing impact of social media on our culture could (it's not that big a stretch) be attributed to the success of STAR TREK, or perhaps more importantly of STAR TREK LIVES! a little Bantam paperback that went 8 printings in the 1970's.
The conventions and fanac (fan activity) surrounding Star Trek became public knowledge as the New York Times and other big papers picked up the hints in STAR TREK LIVES! about K/S and other exotic fiction experiments.
Star Trek itself went only 3 seasons then grew in syndication. The media execs wanted to repeat this "fandom" phenomenon, and thought they had it with SPACE 1999, which Trek fans sneered at and stayed away from though it was advertised as Star Trek fans will love it.
Likewise the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA -- (not the remake which is Intimate Adventure
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventure.html and Ronald D. Moore has even said so
http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventurecomments.html )
They tried and tried, and they just could not duplicate the appeal of Star Trek. But Trek fans took the K/S premise and "slashed" combos of characters in other shows and made fascinating reading in fanzines for shows that have absolutely no SF appeal.
We eventually got Star Trek films, new series, a few new series, and a hiatus, now a new Star Trek movie, with the one thing no fan would have gone for in 1990 - NEW SPOCK AND KIRK ACTORS.
That's the test of a classic role - when a succession of generations of actors play the role successfully, the role becomes bigger than any actor.
That's important to understand. It's vital. It means Hollywood has stopped excluding SF from the concept "classic." And that's happened gradually as SF and Fantasy movies have won Oscars (which was unthinkable before Trek).
Star Trek and Trek fandom broke down a wall in our world, and now Trek has spread to all levels of the ambient society and culture.
Don't forget, it was Trek fans in a university environment that basically invented the internet to play a video game from campus to campus. A Trek type video game.
Christoph Niemann goes on and on about the social networking and the internet changing our very economy, our entire concept of personal property is being changed.
Gene Roddenberry's concept of the Trek universe was that it had no MONEY - money wasn't used anymore, nor were pockets needed to carry money. People weren't hired to crew the Enterprise; they were volunteers. Honest, that was his concept and few have ever understood that.
So Star Trek spawned the Internet, and the older SF fandom which spawned ST fandom has now spawned what Niemann dubs "the new socialism" in Web 2.0 and social networking.
Any number of us on this blog have mentioned how disregarded readers of SF were in the 1950's and 1960's. Disparaged. Held in open contempt wouldn't be too strong a wording for the attitude we endured for liking science fiction. Fantasy was even worse.
Then came Star Trek. It got cancelled because it was science fiction. (really, the network execs who made the decision didn't care about the tons of fan mail -- they just didn't like the show. That's it.)
So "we" fans organized in just the way Niemann describes what he thinks is a new cultural form, and we beat Hollywood to its knees and produced this new Star Trek film which has been given rave reviews and a HUGE amount of space in Variety, the NYTimes, Wired Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Business Week -- you name it. Talk about prestige.
WE WON! We fought for decades. We used the oldest tool in the fannish arsenal, FANDOM ITSELF, its strange organization, its unique way of using words, its intrinsic value system and economy of sharing -- most especially fueled by the LoC.
And we won.
Science Fiction and Fantasy are now mainstream.
How did that happen?
Star Trek -- Wagon Train To The Stars. (based on the incredibly long running TV show that everyone watched Wagon Train).
Star Trek, OK nobody else will ever notice this is true, because it took 40 years and everyone's forgotten everything about that long-ago time -- none of the salient facts of how this happened have ever been recorded for posterity because Star Trek and SF in general was not important.
Star Trek provided the pivot point in history, the inflection point, the "place to stand" and eventually with the films, books, and fanzines, provided the "lever long enough" and we changed the world into the vision Niemann is talking about in Wired.
These people who are inventing Web 2.0 devices, un-inventing copyright and all the industrial complex business models, in fact uninventing currency itself, these people are the descendents barely 2 generations removed from those who envisioned the future world of Star Trek.
The impact of Star Trek is just beginning to be felt (will never be identified officially, I'm sure) in the pulverization of our culture and our society and our business models. But we can take a lesson from all this.
The world was inimical to the SF fan. SF fans flocked to the first real SF on TV. We changed the world to be friendly to SF and SF fans.
The world is inimical to Romance. Romance fans need a vehicle to flock to. Then we will change the world.
The vehicle SF fans flocked to was a TV show, because at that time about a third of all the adults in the USA watched TV. There were 3 networks. What else was there to do in the evening but listen to the radio which didn't have any good shows anymore.
The vehicle Romance fans need has got to be Web 2.0 based.
Look at the numbers and websites with numbers that I talked about last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Nobody watched TV anymore. And the TV watching public is graying fast. Any TV watching younger people do is on the web.
The web as a fiction delivery system is burgeoning, and copyright and other business model elements from the 1600's to the 1900's only strangle that burgeoning growth.
We're having our economy shattered by the new business models, uninventing money and labor for a wage, etc.
Do we, as Romance readers, writers and fans, do we seriously want to add a shattering effect from Romance, which is our fundamental life's relationship to this deadly mixture?
Or do we, as Romance readers, writers and fans, bear an obligation to produce that Romance vehicle that will draw us together to become a Web 2.0 force, (and Web 3.0 is already in launch mode!) to provide the SOLUTION to the pulverizing, culture shattering, social fabric ripping effects of the loss of copyright?
Which is it? Tell me by commenting on this post that's longer than a chapter in a long book!
If you got all the way to the end of this post and have any idea what I'm talking about, you owe me a LoC according to Christoph Niemann.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Showing posts with label Reaper. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reaper. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Urban Fantasy Job Hunting
The May 2009 issue of LOCUS, the newspaper of science fiction and fantasy, now (since it was sold to a professional publisher,) billed as "The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field," is devoted to Urban Fantasy.
http://www.locusmag.com/ is their online site.
I've written here before about the shift in popularity away from SF and toward Fantasy, which is allowing the development of the Paranormal Romance and SF Romance field. So, in the context of the release of the new Star Trek movie, let's talk a little about what Romance readers can expect and what writers can provide for them.
This is an exercise in worldbuilding by using a "connect the dots" technique on what we often term "the real world."
So here are some dots.
I've started to get the copies of Business Week that I was forced to spend airline miles on. The first issue is the May 11, 2009 issue. Putting Locus together with Business Week (and later with a NEWSWEEK article on Star Trek we'll get to later) started my mind percolating.
So let's think about choosing your background for your story in such a way that it excites readers, gets their minds percolating in a pleasurable way. That's what SF does -- makes you think, shows you how to think but not what to think.
You want to create a background that makes your reader anticipate a good read, an experience "just like" the latest book they loved, but different, unique and especially yours. You want your readers to memorize your byline and search the world for MORE of your stuff.
To do that, you have to pull thousands of little details together, details lurking in the background, or just off the edge of your potential reader's peripheral vision.
How do you do that? You read eclectically, often in a way that appears to your family, randomly! You collect a mental store of trivia others have never heard of.
If wide reading on many subjects repells you, you probably aren't going to be a fiction writer (maybe non-fiction in one field?) If trivia doesn't grip you, then you probably should look for another line of work. But assuming you think you have a few novels in you, think about two nearly mutually exclusive sources such as Business Week and Locus in one breath, then think BACKGROUND, and even "backstory."
Or if you're into film writing, think SET PIECE. And SETTING.
How does a writer cradle a ho-hum-yawn-not-again plotted Romance in a background that makes that old story new again?
You must do that because there really aren't that many stories, or or plots, or that many Romances either.
What hooks readers is how these particular, very individualistic characters adjust themselves to the harsh world they must live in, and still manage to nurture deep, rich and intimate Relationships.
Writers seem to be born with characters yelling in their heads, "TELL MY STORY NEXT!" I've seen 4 year olds do it with blunt crayons! Characters are often innate traits of writers. (there are exceptions; Hal Clement was one such. The hero of his novels was always the World and the Science. The characters just investigated and learned how the science works.)
But backgrounds, now there is where writers can get wildly creative if they have a big enough store of trivia.
Note how the 4 year old with blunt crayons always chooses a background they know.
As an adult, you need to tell your story against a background you know, too, but it does not (and perhaps even should not) have to be some place you have been, or are familiar with, such as the Trek Universe worked over so well by fan writers (like me and my Kraith Universe ( http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/ )).
Or it can be someplace you just make up or imagine as the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, imagined his Galaxy.
Or that place you imagine can be right here on earth, a place a lot of people (even your potential readers) have been or seen on TV ( 90210 for example).
In my August 2009 review column (which will likely be posted to the web for free reading in September 2009) I reviewed an international intrigue thriller that's likely to be a movie soon titled THE INCREMENT.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ (scroll down to August and you'll see the book cover -- that's where the review links will be).
THE INCREMENT
Or see my review here:
http://www.amazon.com/Increment-Novel-David-Ignatius/product-reviews/0393065049/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_3?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=3
The author of THE INCREMENT, David Ignatius, says in his comments that though the book is partly set in Iran, and though he's actually been there, THIS IRAN is totally imaginary. He didn't say it was an alternate-reality fantasy world, likely because the marketing department would scream "LIMITING THE AUDIENCE" -- but that's actually what this book is and does.
Yet the new Star Trek movie is billed as "alternate universe" to the one we originally saw on TV and its successors, just as Kraith is an "alternate universe" to ST:TOS.
So that means THE INCREMENT is an URBAN FANTASY marketed as a contemporary international intrigue thriller and it even has some intricate relationships, though I wouldn't call it a Romance. A little re-writing and it could easily have been a Romance!
But it's being marketed at the top of the marketing pyramid with lots of publicity money behind it -- likely because it's not being marketed as what it really is, an Urban Fantasy!
OK, so how would a Paranormal Romance Writer follow in David Ignatius's illustrious footsteps? Of course if I really knew for sure, I'd have done that by now! But let's think about how it might be done.
START WITH TWO STEPS AND CONNECT THE DOTS:
1. Note via Locus that "Urban Fantasy" has begun to surface in a big way. I've been talking about BUFFY and other TV shows like REAPER and SUPERNATURAL (see my blog post here http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/04/puzzle-of-romance.html ) and the DRESDEN FILES (which I reviewed another novel from in the forthcoming October Issue -- you can see all my 2009 picks at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ ) and Locus is surveying a whole lot more. It's a trend.
2. NOTE via Business Week that the general media is now admitting but dancing around something SF writers have talked about since at least the 1950's -- probably much earlier but I haven't time to research it. I'll tell you about it below.
THEN REMEMBER my column here last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
where I talked about an emerging trend of using Tech to solve problems created by Tech.
Now, #2 above -- the BUSINESS WEEK headline on the cover, lower left corner, said THE U.S. HAS 3 MILLION JOB OPENINGS; "Why that may NOT be good news for the economy."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
QUOTES FROM BUSINESS WEEK
-------------------
"...with 13 million people unemployed, there are approximately 3 million jobs that employers are actively recruiting for but so far have been unable to fill. ... People thrown out of shrinking sectors such as construction, finance, and retail lack the skills and training for openings in growing fields including education, accounting, health care, and government."
...
"The U. S. economy has changed dramatically over the past couple of years-- faster, it seems than the workforce can adapt. The evidence is clear in an underappreciated report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics known as JOLTS, for Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey, which has been issued monthly since December 2000."
--------------------------
Now doesn't that depict a "harsh" world for characters to find meaningful relationships in?
All right, so let's hunt up some more dots to connect into this picture.
I often hear Bernanke's testimony before congress as I'm cooking because I have a TV I can see from the kitchen. I've heard him and Greenspan talking about retraining people for the new jobs of the 21st century -- and that all America has to do is pour money into community colleges to retrain our workforce.
I think it's a good thing that Obama's "stimulus" allocates money for community college retraining of adults project. Obama made a speech on retraining the workforce on Friday May 8, 2009. That WILL work for a lot of people and save families and lives and children's futures, not to mention the whole USA economy. It's a good thing, and something we need to do at any cost.
BUT.
And it's a great big but.
Read the article titled HELP WANTED in the May 11, 2009 issue of Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
Now think real hard. What is actually going on in this turbulent and bewildering shift in employment. Remember how I talked about the wireless connection for digital picture frames last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
Another trend, solving tech problems by ladling on more tech. But the picture frames solve the problem of the anti-tech grandma you want to show your children to.
The "smart" gadget, smart machine trend tells you something. Replacing computers, you have a smart-phone with a camera and web access. They put chips in cars now -- you almost hardly have to drive them anymore! Corner too fast, it levels out. Get too close to a bumper, the chip stops the car (OK, I can't afford such a high end car, but my first response is I don't want that! I want to be in control of my vehicle! So maybe I'm becoming anti-tech.)
But it's a trend. Smart machines, not monstrous computers you have to be a genius to keep running!
What is going on here?
Our society has hit some kind of limit that Congress and the Fed and others "in charge" either don't recognize or can't admit exists for political reasons.
Dig back into your pile of trivia stored in your mind. Do you remember why 100 is the AVERAGE IQ?
OK, IQ tests are rigged to reward people of a certain cultural background, but all that aside, the IQ test is supposed to measure not what you know but how fast you can learn. They've been tweaking the test to eliminate racial bias and so on; it's probably still not very good, but it's good for statistics.
Always remember statistics can tell you very accurately how large populations behave, but DO NOT WORK IN REVERSE. They can't tell you a thing about any given individual in that population! The math isn't designed to work in reverse!
But IQ tests when aggregated can tell you about the characteristics of millions of people, and predict the behavior of that population with high accuracy.
100 is the average because about half the people in the world score below 100 while half score above.
Scroll back and read what I said above about WRITERS. We're eclectic readers and collectors of vast piles of trivia. Why? Not because we're a whole lot smarter (IQ wise) than others, but because we get a pleasure hit out of "dabbling" in anything and everything. We're attracted to what we don't know.
It's more an attitude or character trait than a measure of learning ability, but as a group we tend to maximize whatever natural learning ability we might have. We perform at possibly over 90% of our personal potential for learning, while MOST people are lucky to use half what they were born with.
Marion Zimmer Bradley often said anyone who can write a literate sentence can learn to write fiction. So I'm not saying writers, per se, are extra-high intelligence (thought some, like Isaac Asimov, are/were). But writers are good at finding patterns in trivia! (I can't now recall if I talked about pattern recognition in this aliendjinnromance blog or in my review column, but some of you will remember that discussion.)
So here's a pattern from the dots.
Long ago, SF writers started depicting a future civilization when half or more of the people lived on the public dole (welfare).
Why?
In some novels it was because it really didn't take so many people to run the world, produce food, clothing, shelter, entertainment and luxuries for everyone. Machines (maybe robots) did most of the work, and the rest of us loafed. ( PBS NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT has done a week's worth of segments on household robots being developed in Japan that do laundry, dishes, & cleaning! By 2020 they'll be on the market.)
In other novels, the world was depicted pretty close to what I'm seeing in this Business Week article -- and possibly also in the Locus issue.
Business Week is saying essentially that though we have massive excess "workers" employers simply CAN'T fill jobs.
Greenspan and Bernanke (and now Obama) are always talking about solving that problem by simply retraining the work force. But employers have found that's getting to be less and less possible.
According to Business Week, retraining older workers has worked pretty well in Germany where the government provides a part of a new worker's salary for the first year so the employer can "retrain" them to what they need. But employers in Germany are quoted as pointing out that they need that government assistance because "you never know what'll happen" when you hire "someone."
That might be a way of saying without saying the extremely politically incorrect observation I'm making. (controversial or "edgy" premises sell large numbers of books!)
As tech progresses, it takes a higher and higher IQ to be able to learn the jobs needed to produce the dumbed-down tech like wireless picture frames.
The jobs that are being produced that really pay well are jobs that require an IQ above 100 to learn even if not to do on a day to day basis. Maybe in 10 years, that'll be 110 to learn and 105 to do daily.
Our workforce lacks the intelligence to be able to do the jobs we need done.
That's not a property of our culture or civilization or society. It's a property of the human brain -- but as I've pointed out in a previous blog post here, the human brain is mutable. As long as you keep requiring it to adapt, it will keep adapting. In older people, that adaptability wanes, but pushed hard you can get some adaptation. But not enough to make an IQ 98 person at age 12 into an IQ 105 person at age 55.
The jobs we need done require higher IQ than average to learn, and by definition you can't have more than half the people above average! (In SF though, you might be able to raise that average, which was done so many times in SF novels in the 1950's it became an unpublishable cliche.)
SF has been predicting, graphically, for decades, that our jobs outstrip out IQ, and our civilization could crash because of it.
But note, Grandma who needs a wireless digital picture frame isn't dumb, stupid, or low-I.Q.
She may have been a Bank VP or a factory manager, or even a science reporter (though these days that's not likely as women of that generation were barred from such professional success). But she may have been VERY smart. Only now she just can't learn to maintain a PC and plug a picture frame into its USB port and download her own photos.
Grandma may flinch visibly when someone says USB PORT. Thirty years ago she'd have had no trouble learning it.
There's your big problem. As you age, your original IQ trends downward. The older you are, the harder it becomes to learn, especially if you haven't been learning steadily in between. Routine jobs erode the ability to learn new things.
These wireless frames are hot sellers because they're EASY and both the younger people who are busy and older people who prefer to avoid learning -- and those who really can't learn -- love the whole concept. Hence they are best sellers, must have household tech.
Tech is making the world easier to live in but harder to create.
And so the threshold IQ level for being able to hold a job that's worth a living wage is going up and up. Soon, anyone with an IQ below 115 won't be worth anything in the labor market. Robots will do yard work, repave roads, build skyscrapers, all run from nice cool offices by Suits wearing diamond watches -- or diamond studded Bluetooth ear piece.
Now look at Urban Fantasy. Contrast that with old fashioned SF.
Actually, my September to December review columns are basically about just this subject -- SF and Urban Fantasy.
The way you tell if a story is Science Fiction or not is: "If you can leave out the Science and still have a story, it's not SF to begin with."
SF is waning in sales volumes of titles, really falling off the charts while Fantasy is booming.
What's the difference? They both tell the same STORY. Like I said above, same old ho-hum romance, different setting, goshwow story!
The difference between urban fantasy and sf is the science.
Today's science is much HARDER (required IQ to decipher concepts) than the science of the 1930's and 1940's. It didn't take as high an IQ to comprehend a scientific explanation then as it does now.
Science itself has become unpopular. What's "popular"? More than half the population likes it and wants it.
Now our science -- the exciting, cutting edge, speculative, goshwow science -- is comprehensible only to people with an IQ well above 100, which means to less than half the population.
We may have passed that halfway point sometime in the 1990's as the tech bubble inflated -- some day someone will make a graph and we'll see an inflection point.
Urban Fantasy heroes have to be brave, perhaps have integrity or grit or a streak of pure evil -- but they don't have to be smart. Even the geeks who run computer searches don't have to be smart. Hacking is not a trade for the high I.Q. people either -- you buy or steal your "hacking tools" which are programs someone with a high IQ makes and sells to hackers.
Urban Fantasy is about the potential achievements of ORDINARY PEOPLE -- people with an IQ of about 100 -- the average reader, maybe 105. These stories show how average-joe can achieve GREAT THINGS, (power, popularity, save the world, defend mankind from evil -- easy things to understand).
Science Fiction -- to have any modern science in it at all -- has to be about really REALLY smart people. The kind of people the average reader can't identify with. It's no fun to be out-classed, or to be shown a destiny you want but can't have because you're not smart enough even to understand the dumbed-down exposition in an SF novel.
In the old days, SF didn't have to be about such geniuses.
Here's another dot for our pattern. NEWSWEEK May 4, 2009, published a Star Trek article titled WE'RE ALL TREKKIES NOW. I commented on it online, and posted a link to my comment and got a whole bunch of new twitter followers! Here's the NEWSWEEK LINKS:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195082 -- We're All Trekkies Now
My comment is labeled as posted
Posted By: JacquelineLichtenberg @ 05/08/2009 2:08:06 PM
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/popvox/archive/2009/05/07/round-up-of-newsweek-s-trek-coverage.aspx -- list of Star Trek coverage in NEWSWEEK, lots of stories.
The thesis of this Newsweek article (ignore the politics; that's just NEWSWEEK) is one that I totally agree with, and that's an important dot to this pattern. STAR TREK depicted humanity as capable of taking on the universe and prevailing. STAR TREK showed humanity as having outgrown war and embracing new contact with the unknown -- going where no one has gone before.
In the decades since ST:TOS, SF has been eclipsed by fantasy universes (on TV, in film, and in books) where humanity is depicted as threatened (in serious danger of being destroyed) by the Unknown -- and possibly unknowable. What I've called in this blog a picture of reality as a thin film over a seething cauldron of evil.
The self-perception (at least in America) has become one of being overwhelmed by a universe inimical to our existence.
So the problem employers are having filling jobs today reflects the general public's taste in entertainment. People are overwhelmed. By tech. By war. By government conspiracy or at least secrecy and incompetence. And now by the housing bubble bursting. Overwhelmed by evil is the same as overwhelmed by something that can kill you, destroy what you've accomplished in life (take away your pension).
Now do you see the technique? Deconstruct or reverse-engineer our everyday world into dots, then reconnect the dots into a DIFFERENT pattern. That will, if you use the genre structures we've discussed, give you that effect Hollywood is always looking for (and Manhattan lusts after), "The Same But Different."
To summarize, here are the dots for today's exercise:
1) URBAN FANTASY in Locus and Alternate Universe such as THE INCREMENT and STAR TREK
2) BUSINESS WEEK - 3 million jobs open with 13 million unemployed and Obama's solution is to "retrain" the workforce. (your characters are in retraining or teaching re-trainees).
3) NEWSWEEK - We're All Trekkies Now. Geeks have inherited the Earth and the White House. The Star Trek spirit of seeing an upbeat future awakens again -- or does it?
4) The popular theme of being overwhelmed (or almost overwhelmed) or needing protection from Evil that seethes beneath the surface of everyday life. Will that theme give way to Star Trek's HOPE theme, and if it does, what turbulence will disrupt romance?
5) Not mentioned here, but there's a trend of 30 and 40+ year old women FINALLY beginning to have children that might be relevant to building your SF Romance world.
So now re-connect the dots and do a little original worldbuilding.
Take your readers' awareness of the general IQ frustration (just think of the last time your computer made you feel helpless and you've got the emotion) as the background you're cradling your romance (or whatever genre; this process works for all genres) in, and tell a whopping good story about how IQ itself is a major stumbling block in intimacy in relationships.
You may generate more obstacles for your plot by creating characters to represent the various sides of the philosophical argument on the true nature of Humanity, and therein will lie your THEME.
Are humans like lemmings, carrying the seeds of their destruction within them (i.e. creating tech so "high" that we can't produce workers to maintain it but we become dependent on it for lack of basic grunt-work skills (spinning, weaving, farming, shepherding, metal working)? Or are humans infinitely adaptable, with brains that will re-circuit so that each generation's IQ 100 is actually HIGHER THAN the IQ 100 mark of the previous generation?
Is that what's happening already? It used to be parents had to get their kids to program the VCR. Now kids live online and text with their thumbs in coded words. Grown kids have to send pictures of their kids to their parents via dumbed-down-wireless-pictureframes. The parents won't twitter and the keener parents will just barely facebook but not myspace.
Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing are beyond today's 60 year olds.
The Web is the territory of the young (OK. I'm a misfit. So what else is new?)
How does the May/September Romance work out in a world with a generation gap like this? Will the Star Trek movie change anything?
You may, if you wish, post exercises on editingcircle.blogspot.com as comments for and get some input on how you do the exercise.
And remember, you don't have to AGREE with my analysis here - in fact it's better if you don't - in order to reconnect these dots into a new pattern and profit from the exercise. These dots could be a springboard into a hot Romance full of impossible things before breakfast.
Do you, as a writer, follow the trend -- or do you forge it?
And also remember, our objective in my last few posts here is to work the puzzle of how to get an SF Romance onto TV or into the movies to do for the genre what we have done (according to NEWSWEEK, anyway) for SF.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.locusmag.com/ is their online site.
I've written here before about the shift in popularity away from SF and toward Fantasy, which is allowing the development of the Paranormal Romance and SF Romance field. So, in the context of the release of the new Star Trek movie, let's talk a little about what Romance readers can expect and what writers can provide for them.
This is an exercise in worldbuilding by using a "connect the dots" technique on what we often term "the real world."
So here are some dots.
I've started to get the copies of Business Week that I was forced to spend airline miles on. The first issue is the May 11, 2009 issue. Putting Locus together with Business Week (and later with a NEWSWEEK article on Star Trek we'll get to later) started my mind percolating.
So let's think about choosing your background for your story in such a way that it excites readers, gets their minds percolating in a pleasurable way. That's what SF does -- makes you think, shows you how to think but not what to think.
You want to create a background that makes your reader anticipate a good read, an experience "just like" the latest book they loved, but different, unique and especially yours. You want your readers to memorize your byline and search the world for MORE of your stuff.
To do that, you have to pull thousands of little details together, details lurking in the background, or just off the edge of your potential reader's peripheral vision.
How do you do that? You read eclectically, often in a way that appears to your family, randomly! You collect a mental store of trivia others have never heard of.
If wide reading on many subjects repells you, you probably aren't going to be a fiction writer (maybe non-fiction in one field?) If trivia doesn't grip you, then you probably should look for another line of work. But assuming you think you have a few novels in you, think about two nearly mutually exclusive sources such as Business Week and Locus in one breath, then think BACKGROUND, and even "backstory."
Or if you're into film writing, think SET PIECE. And SETTING.
How does a writer cradle a ho-hum-yawn-not-again plotted Romance in a background that makes that old story new again?
You must do that because there really aren't that many stories, or or plots, or that many Romances either.
What hooks readers is how these particular, very individualistic characters adjust themselves to the harsh world they must live in, and still manage to nurture deep, rich and intimate Relationships.
Writers seem to be born with characters yelling in their heads, "TELL MY STORY NEXT!" I've seen 4 year olds do it with blunt crayons! Characters are often innate traits of writers. (there are exceptions; Hal Clement was one such. The hero of his novels was always the World and the Science. The characters just investigated and learned how the science works.)
But backgrounds, now there is where writers can get wildly creative if they have a big enough store of trivia.
Note how the 4 year old with blunt crayons always chooses a background they know.
As an adult, you need to tell your story against a background you know, too, but it does not (and perhaps even should not) have to be some place you have been, or are familiar with, such as the Trek Universe worked over so well by fan writers (like me and my Kraith Universe ( http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/kraith/ )).
Or it can be someplace you just make up or imagine as the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, imagined his Galaxy.
Or that place you imagine can be right here on earth, a place a lot of people (even your potential readers) have been or seen on TV ( 90210 for example).
In my August 2009 review column (which will likely be posted to the web for free reading in September 2009) I reviewed an international intrigue thriller that's likely to be a movie soon titled THE INCREMENT.
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ (scroll down to August and you'll see the book cover -- that's where the review links will be).
THE INCREMENT
Or see my review here:
http://www.amazon.com/Increment-Novel-David-Ignatius/product-reviews/0393065049/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_3?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=3
The author of THE INCREMENT, David Ignatius, says in his comments that though the book is partly set in Iran, and though he's actually been there, THIS IRAN is totally imaginary. He didn't say it was an alternate-reality fantasy world, likely because the marketing department would scream "LIMITING THE AUDIENCE" -- but that's actually what this book is and does.
Yet the new Star Trek movie is billed as "alternate universe" to the one we originally saw on TV and its successors, just as Kraith is an "alternate universe" to ST:TOS.
So that means THE INCREMENT is an URBAN FANTASY marketed as a contemporary international intrigue thriller and it even has some intricate relationships, though I wouldn't call it a Romance. A little re-writing and it could easily have been a Romance!
But it's being marketed at the top of the marketing pyramid with lots of publicity money behind it -- likely because it's not being marketed as what it really is, an Urban Fantasy!
OK, so how would a Paranormal Romance Writer follow in David Ignatius's illustrious footsteps? Of course if I really knew for sure, I'd have done that by now! But let's think about how it might be done.
START WITH TWO STEPS AND CONNECT THE DOTS:
1. Note via Locus that "Urban Fantasy" has begun to surface in a big way. I've been talking about BUFFY and other TV shows like REAPER and SUPERNATURAL (see my blog post here http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/04/puzzle-of-romance.html ) and the DRESDEN FILES (which I reviewed another novel from in the forthcoming October Issue -- you can see all my 2009 picks at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2009/ ) and Locus is surveying a whole lot more. It's a trend.
2. NOTE via Business Week that the general media is now admitting but dancing around something SF writers have talked about since at least the 1950's -- probably much earlier but I haven't time to research it. I'll tell you about it below.
THEN REMEMBER my column here last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
where I talked about an emerging trend of using Tech to solve problems created by Tech.
Now, #2 above -- the BUSINESS WEEK headline on the cover, lower left corner, said THE U.S. HAS 3 MILLION JOB OPENINGS; "Why that may NOT be good news for the economy."
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
QUOTES FROM BUSINESS WEEK
-------------------
"...with 13 million people unemployed, there are approximately 3 million jobs that employers are actively recruiting for but so far have been unable to fill. ... People thrown out of shrinking sectors such as construction, finance, and retail lack the skills and training for openings in growing fields including education, accounting, health care, and government."
...
"The U. S. economy has changed dramatically over the past couple of years-- faster, it seems than the workforce can adapt. The evidence is clear in an underappreciated report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics known as JOLTS, for Job Openings & Labor Turnover Survey, which has been issued monthly since December 2000."
--------------------------
Now doesn't that depict a "harsh" world for characters to find meaningful relationships in?
All right, so let's hunt up some more dots to connect into this picture.
I often hear Bernanke's testimony before congress as I'm cooking because I have a TV I can see from the kitchen. I've heard him and Greenspan talking about retraining people for the new jobs of the 21st century -- and that all America has to do is pour money into community colleges to retrain our workforce.
I think it's a good thing that Obama's "stimulus" allocates money for community college retraining of adults project. Obama made a speech on retraining the workforce on Friday May 8, 2009. That WILL work for a lot of people and save families and lives and children's futures, not to mention the whole USA economy. It's a good thing, and something we need to do at any cost.
BUT.
And it's a great big but.
Read the article titled HELP WANTED in the May 11, 2009 issue of Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_19/b4130040117561.htm
Now think real hard. What is actually going on in this turbulent and bewildering shift in employment. Remember how I talked about the wireless connection for digital picture frames last week
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/writing-tips-tweets.html
Another trend, solving tech problems by ladling on more tech. But the picture frames solve the problem of the anti-tech grandma you want to show your children to.
The "smart" gadget, smart machine trend tells you something. Replacing computers, you have a smart-phone with a camera and web access. They put chips in cars now -- you almost hardly have to drive them anymore! Corner too fast, it levels out. Get too close to a bumper, the chip stops the car (OK, I can't afford such a high end car, but my first response is I don't want that! I want to be in control of my vehicle! So maybe I'm becoming anti-tech.)
But it's a trend. Smart machines, not monstrous computers you have to be a genius to keep running!
What is going on here?
Our society has hit some kind of limit that Congress and the Fed and others "in charge" either don't recognize or can't admit exists for political reasons.
Dig back into your pile of trivia stored in your mind. Do you remember why 100 is the AVERAGE IQ?
OK, IQ tests are rigged to reward people of a certain cultural background, but all that aside, the IQ test is supposed to measure not what you know but how fast you can learn. They've been tweaking the test to eliminate racial bias and so on; it's probably still not very good, but it's good for statistics.
Always remember statistics can tell you very accurately how large populations behave, but DO NOT WORK IN REVERSE. They can't tell you a thing about any given individual in that population! The math isn't designed to work in reverse!
But IQ tests when aggregated can tell you about the characteristics of millions of people, and predict the behavior of that population with high accuracy.
100 is the average because about half the people in the world score below 100 while half score above.
Scroll back and read what I said above about WRITERS. We're eclectic readers and collectors of vast piles of trivia. Why? Not because we're a whole lot smarter (IQ wise) than others, but because we get a pleasure hit out of "dabbling" in anything and everything. We're attracted to what we don't know.
It's more an attitude or character trait than a measure of learning ability, but as a group we tend to maximize whatever natural learning ability we might have. We perform at possibly over 90% of our personal potential for learning, while MOST people are lucky to use half what they were born with.
Marion Zimmer Bradley often said anyone who can write a literate sentence can learn to write fiction. So I'm not saying writers, per se, are extra-high intelligence (thought some, like Isaac Asimov, are/were). But writers are good at finding patterns in trivia! (I can't now recall if I talked about pattern recognition in this aliendjinnromance blog or in my review column, but some of you will remember that discussion.)
So here's a pattern from the dots.
Long ago, SF writers started depicting a future civilization when half or more of the people lived on the public dole (welfare).
Why?
In some novels it was because it really didn't take so many people to run the world, produce food, clothing, shelter, entertainment and luxuries for everyone. Machines (maybe robots) did most of the work, and the rest of us loafed. ( PBS NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT has done a week's worth of segments on household robots being developed in Japan that do laundry, dishes, & cleaning! By 2020 they'll be on the market.)
In other novels, the world was depicted pretty close to what I'm seeing in this Business Week article -- and possibly also in the Locus issue.
Business Week is saying essentially that though we have massive excess "workers" employers simply CAN'T fill jobs.
Greenspan and Bernanke (and now Obama) are always talking about solving that problem by simply retraining the work force. But employers have found that's getting to be less and less possible.
According to Business Week, retraining older workers has worked pretty well in Germany where the government provides a part of a new worker's salary for the first year so the employer can "retrain" them to what they need. But employers in Germany are quoted as pointing out that they need that government assistance because "you never know what'll happen" when you hire "someone."
That might be a way of saying without saying the extremely politically incorrect observation I'm making. (controversial or "edgy" premises sell large numbers of books!)
As tech progresses, it takes a higher and higher IQ to be able to learn the jobs needed to produce the dumbed-down tech like wireless picture frames.
The jobs that are being produced that really pay well are jobs that require an IQ above 100 to learn even if not to do on a day to day basis. Maybe in 10 years, that'll be 110 to learn and 105 to do daily.
Our workforce lacks the intelligence to be able to do the jobs we need done.
That's not a property of our culture or civilization or society. It's a property of the human brain -- but as I've pointed out in a previous blog post here, the human brain is mutable. As long as you keep requiring it to adapt, it will keep adapting. In older people, that adaptability wanes, but pushed hard you can get some adaptation. But not enough to make an IQ 98 person at age 12 into an IQ 105 person at age 55.
The jobs we need done require higher IQ than average to learn, and by definition you can't have more than half the people above average! (In SF though, you might be able to raise that average, which was done so many times in SF novels in the 1950's it became an unpublishable cliche.)
SF has been predicting, graphically, for decades, that our jobs outstrip out IQ, and our civilization could crash because of it.
But note, Grandma who needs a wireless digital picture frame isn't dumb, stupid, or low-I.Q.
She may have been a Bank VP or a factory manager, or even a science reporter (though these days that's not likely as women of that generation were barred from such professional success). But she may have been VERY smart. Only now she just can't learn to maintain a PC and plug a picture frame into its USB port and download her own photos.
Grandma may flinch visibly when someone says USB PORT. Thirty years ago she'd have had no trouble learning it.
There's your big problem. As you age, your original IQ trends downward. The older you are, the harder it becomes to learn, especially if you haven't been learning steadily in between. Routine jobs erode the ability to learn new things.
These wireless frames are hot sellers because they're EASY and both the younger people who are busy and older people who prefer to avoid learning -- and those who really can't learn -- love the whole concept. Hence they are best sellers, must have household tech.
Tech is making the world easier to live in but harder to create.
And so the threshold IQ level for being able to hold a job that's worth a living wage is going up and up. Soon, anyone with an IQ below 115 won't be worth anything in the labor market. Robots will do yard work, repave roads, build skyscrapers, all run from nice cool offices by Suits wearing diamond watches -- or diamond studded Bluetooth ear piece.
Now look at Urban Fantasy. Contrast that with old fashioned SF.
Actually, my September to December review columns are basically about just this subject -- SF and Urban Fantasy.
The way you tell if a story is Science Fiction or not is: "If you can leave out the Science and still have a story, it's not SF to begin with."
SF is waning in sales volumes of titles, really falling off the charts while Fantasy is booming.
What's the difference? They both tell the same STORY. Like I said above, same old ho-hum romance, different setting, goshwow story!
The difference between urban fantasy and sf is the science.
Today's science is much HARDER (required IQ to decipher concepts) than the science of the 1930's and 1940's. It didn't take as high an IQ to comprehend a scientific explanation then as it does now.
Science itself has become unpopular. What's "popular"? More than half the population likes it and wants it.
Now our science -- the exciting, cutting edge, speculative, goshwow science -- is comprehensible only to people with an IQ well above 100, which means to less than half the population.
We may have passed that halfway point sometime in the 1990's as the tech bubble inflated -- some day someone will make a graph and we'll see an inflection point.
Urban Fantasy heroes have to be brave, perhaps have integrity or grit or a streak of pure evil -- but they don't have to be smart. Even the geeks who run computer searches don't have to be smart. Hacking is not a trade for the high I.Q. people either -- you buy or steal your "hacking tools" which are programs someone with a high IQ makes and sells to hackers.
Urban Fantasy is about the potential achievements of ORDINARY PEOPLE -- people with an IQ of about 100 -- the average reader, maybe 105. These stories show how average-joe can achieve GREAT THINGS, (power, popularity, save the world, defend mankind from evil -- easy things to understand).
Science Fiction -- to have any modern science in it at all -- has to be about really REALLY smart people. The kind of people the average reader can't identify with. It's no fun to be out-classed, or to be shown a destiny you want but can't have because you're not smart enough even to understand the dumbed-down exposition in an SF novel.
In the old days, SF didn't have to be about such geniuses.
Here's another dot for our pattern. NEWSWEEK May 4, 2009, published a Star Trek article titled WE'RE ALL TREKKIES NOW. I commented on it online, and posted a link to my comment and got a whole bunch of new twitter followers! Here's the NEWSWEEK LINKS:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195082 -- We're All Trekkies Now
My comment is labeled as posted
Posted By: JacquelineLichtenberg @ 05/08/2009 2:08:06 PM
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/popvox/archive/2009/05/07/round-up-of-newsweek-s-trek-coverage.aspx -- list of Star Trek coverage in NEWSWEEK, lots of stories.
The thesis of this Newsweek article (ignore the politics; that's just NEWSWEEK) is one that I totally agree with, and that's an important dot to this pattern. STAR TREK depicted humanity as capable of taking on the universe and prevailing. STAR TREK showed humanity as having outgrown war and embracing new contact with the unknown -- going where no one has gone before.
In the decades since ST:TOS, SF has been eclipsed by fantasy universes (on TV, in film, and in books) where humanity is depicted as threatened (in serious danger of being destroyed) by the Unknown -- and possibly unknowable. What I've called in this blog a picture of reality as a thin film over a seething cauldron of evil.
The self-perception (at least in America) has become one of being overwhelmed by a universe inimical to our existence.
So the problem employers are having filling jobs today reflects the general public's taste in entertainment. People are overwhelmed. By tech. By war. By government conspiracy or at least secrecy and incompetence. And now by the housing bubble bursting. Overwhelmed by evil is the same as overwhelmed by something that can kill you, destroy what you've accomplished in life (take away your pension).
Now do you see the technique? Deconstruct or reverse-engineer our everyday world into dots, then reconnect the dots into a DIFFERENT pattern. That will, if you use the genre structures we've discussed, give you that effect Hollywood is always looking for (and Manhattan lusts after), "The Same But Different."
To summarize, here are the dots for today's exercise:
1) URBAN FANTASY in Locus and Alternate Universe such as THE INCREMENT and STAR TREK
2) BUSINESS WEEK - 3 million jobs open with 13 million unemployed and Obama's solution is to "retrain" the workforce. (your characters are in retraining or teaching re-trainees).
3) NEWSWEEK - We're All Trekkies Now. Geeks have inherited the Earth and the White House. The Star Trek spirit of seeing an upbeat future awakens again -- or does it?
4) The popular theme of being overwhelmed (or almost overwhelmed) or needing protection from Evil that seethes beneath the surface of everyday life. Will that theme give way to Star Trek's HOPE theme, and if it does, what turbulence will disrupt romance?
5) Not mentioned here, but there's a trend of 30 and 40+ year old women FINALLY beginning to have children that might be relevant to building your SF Romance world.
So now re-connect the dots and do a little original worldbuilding.
Take your readers' awareness of the general IQ frustration (just think of the last time your computer made you feel helpless and you've got the emotion) as the background you're cradling your romance (or whatever genre; this process works for all genres) in, and tell a whopping good story about how IQ itself is a major stumbling block in intimacy in relationships.
You may generate more obstacles for your plot by creating characters to represent the various sides of the philosophical argument on the true nature of Humanity, and therein will lie your THEME.
Are humans like lemmings, carrying the seeds of their destruction within them (i.e. creating tech so "high" that we can't produce workers to maintain it but we become dependent on it for lack of basic grunt-work skills (spinning, weaving, farming, shepherding, metal working)? Or are humans infinitely adaptable, with brains that will re-circuit so that each generation's IQ 100 is actually HIGHER THAN the IQ 100 mark of the previous generation?
Is that what's happening already? It used to be parents had to get their kids to program the VCR. Now kids live online and text with their thumbs in coded words. Grown kids have to send pictures of their kids to their parents via dumbed-down-wireless-pictureframes. The parents won't twitter and the keener parents will just barely facebook but not myspace.
Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing are beyond today's 60 year olds.
The Web is the territory of the young (OK. I'm a misfit. So what else is new?)
How does the May/September Romance work out in a world with a generation gap like this? Will the Star Trek movie change anything?
You may, if you wish, post exercises on editingcircle.blogspot.com as comments for and get some input on how you do the exercise.
And remember, you don't have to AGREE with my analysis here - in fact it's better if you don't - in order to reconnect these dots into a new pattern and profit from the exercise. These dots could be a springboard into a hot Romance full of impossible things before breakfast.
Do you, as a writer, follow the trend -- or do you forge it?
And also remember, our objective in my last few posts here is to work the puzzle of how to get an SF Romance onto TV or into the movies to do for the genre what we have done (according to NEWSWEEK, anyway) for SF.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Puzzle of Romance
First I want to mention that the survey insertion I put in the blog text a few weeks ago actually worked!
That survey was made on google documents (which you can find if you make a google account and search their menus -- I find mine on my google email page).
Once you folks had entered data, I was able to go to the google documents page where it displays the results as a bar code. It doesn't say who said what, only how many clicked this or that option.
This service is part of the newest wave of innovation called Cloud Computing and I've been seeing more and more articles on it. Businesses are adopting this concept very fast, pushed by the recession, because it's a cheaper way of running computers than having your own IT department.
The concept is that one team of IT experts can run the servers, update and debug the software, run security, etc at a central location. Then when a business needs to do research, needs computing power, needs collaborative documents -- the desk folk all log onto the Internet and work on the distant server just as if that server were in the basement of the building the business is using. Pretty soon, businesses won't need offices!
At any rate, word is that Microsoft is getting very nervous and trying to cut off a piece of that pie for themselves. It totally changes their business model. And that's what we need to do with Alien Romance - change the underlying business model.
Thank you for participating in my little experiment.
I have a list of topics rattling around in my head that I should talk about on this blog, (I'm making quick comments on them at http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/ )
But today I can't seem to get any of those topics to assemble into a point I can actually make in this limited space.
So let's talk a little more about how and why it happens that the Romance field in general (perhaps the Alien Romance, Paranormal Romance field in particular) just can't get the public respect it deserves.
I've said before, and I believe some of the others posting here have also noticed, that Science Fiction became much more publicly acceptable, more accessible, and attracted feature film money and even won Emmy and Oscars where SF never did before, after Star Trek hit the TV screen. Today, when I say, "I'm a science fiction writer," I get a totally different reaction than I did even right after Star Trek.
Daily Variety has a RAVE (and I mean RAVE!!!) review of the new Star Trek movie. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940096.html?categoryid=31&cs=1
What Alien Romance needs, then is a TV show.
MAYBE WE HAVE ONE! Maybe there's something in these 2 TV shows that we can build on. If you don't watch TV, you can browse through these shows online.
Reaper TV Series http://www.cwtv.com/shows/reaper
Supernatural TV Series http://www.cwtv.com/shows/supernatural
Neilsen Ratings for Reaper and Supernatural for mid-April indicate (if I'm reading this page right) about 2 million people watch it live or immediately after on their recording device. I watch them several weeks after on my DVR. Keep in mind there are about 310 million people in the USA, (2010 is a census year). CW is a broadcast network and it may not be on all cable systems. Scifi channel is cable, but not on all cable channels.
Still, statistics are showing that with all the different ways to spend your evenings, a lower percentage of the population is watching TV. The general demographic of TV watchers is growing older (i.e. young people prefer games and their computers). So 2 million is a fairly respectable audience, given the venue. I'm looking at this not for popularity, but for taste.
Reaper and Supernatural seem to be doing better than Smallville which I also love (but not as much as I loved Lois and Clark).
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/04/21/top-cw-primetime-shows-april-13-19-2009/17139 is one of my sources.
REAPER is the one about the young guy whose father sold his soul to the Devil. The Devil now is billing himself as the young man's father, and has entrapped him into collecting souls that "escaped" from Hell. (the whole game could be rigged -- conspiracies within conspiracies).
Choosing Setting is one of the topics rattling in my mind: all about how a writer chooses a setting, how the plot adjusts when you shift the setting, and what commercial advantages you get from settings. Reaper's Setting is a do-it-yourself chain store, and most of the main characters work there.
The show is about the relationships these young people develop, and what all that has to do with Evil, and how Evil weasels its way into lives.
We've had some very interesting entries on this blog about how titillating the BAD BOY image is. Tough guys, bad boys and the alpha male seem to be attractive in a visceral way. None of the human characters on REAPER are alpha male or female. The Devil is the alpha in the show. And the ongoing demon characters are all non-alpha and not very Evil either.
The recent episode of REAPER that brought the Romance aspect to mind was about a demon lurking in an old silver mine, a soul that Son of the Devil had to collect in a "vessel" shaped this time like a hand grenade. (each week, the vessel he collects a soul in has a different form -- they go for the funniest thing they can think of.)
A character they are developing is an escaped renegade demon who takes the form of a nice tall blond girl in love with the Hispanic lead character (short, dark, handsome guy).
In this episode, the 3 boys and 2 of the 3 girls (sans female demon who wanted to be alone to consume a Llama, but later comes to the town flying in her demon shape) went to this deserted silver mining town (in excellent repair) to collect the soul that lurks in the old mine and kills people.
SPOILER
In the end, the boy whose father is The Devil has to decide if a human who has been protecting the demon lives or dies.
He tells the human that he doesn't have to die. He can live a new, full, satisfying life. BUT - when arguing with the demon who wants to kill the human because the human has killed her lover (but that didn't really happen), the son of the Devil says to the demon that she should let him live because he'll have to live with the knowledge of all the horrible things he's done, and that will be torture.
Later, the demon says she found the Son of the Devil sexy because he's turning Evil! (but this demon isn't supposed to be Evil anymore)
At the end, (which my DVR cut off at a strategic spot), the Son of the Devil and his girlfriend are talking over what happened. She breaks off her relationship with him because Evil has invaded every part of his life.
She realized this because of the events in the ghost town. The ghost town excursion was orchestrated by the Devil, who is now proud of his Son who can take any blow no matter how severe.
The scripts for this show have been getting better written! You can actually see the point, understand them and discuss them instead of just laughing.
As they go season to season, the ensemble cast of REAPER has begun the pairing-off dance that we saw done so well on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
As idiotic as the premise and most of the execution of this teen-comedy has seemed to me, I actually have some hope for this show. The impact will be seen as the audience that loves this show grows up and looks for the kind of thing we would call Romance. But I suspect a lot of married adults are watching this show just for the laughs.
Supernatural is likewise popular with just under 2 million viewers, involves two brothers, and The Devil complete with demons, minions and characters who say they are Angels. But the plot requires these (handsome) brothers to break off every Relationship they get into except perhaps with demons.
The existence and survival of these two shows tells us a lot about the forming and flowing of audiences, and the appetite for Relationship which will eventually bespeak the issues of Romance and the HEA ending.
I'm perpetually puzzling over the "Soul Mate" aspect of Romance, and this particular episode of REAPER brought in the sexual attractiveness of Evil, which we play with as the Bad Boy.
And these two shows -- which I thought would surely be cancelled halfway through their first seasons -- are expressing a philosophy of life that resonates with a broad swatch of the TV viewing audience. I have a lot to say about what this popularity says about the present and the future as shaped by viewers of these shows.
There's a whole lot going on in this world, yet Romance survives. Perhaps the question is, "Does humanity need Romance to survive?" I'd say it's our only hope.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
That survey was made on google documents (which you can find if you make a google account and search their menus -- I find mine on my google email page).
Once you folks had entered data, I was able to go to the google documents page where it displays the results as a bar code. It doesn't say who said what, only how many clicked this or that option.
This service is part of the newest wave of innovation called Cloud Computing and I've been seeing more and more articles on it. Businesses are adopting this concept very fast, pushed by the recession, because it's a cheaper way of running computers than having your own IT department.
The concept is that one team of IT experts can run the servers, update and debug the software, run security, etc at a central location. Then when a business needs to do research, needs computing power, needs collaborative documents -- the desk folk all log onto the Internet and work on the distant server just as if that server were in the basement of the building the business is using. Pretty soon, businesses won't need offices!
At any rate, word is that Microsoft is getting very nervous and trying to cut off a piece of that pie for themselves. It totally changes their business model. And that's what we need to do with Alien Romance - change the underlying business model.
Thank you for participating in my little experiment.
I have a list of topics rattling around in my head that I should talk about on this blog, (I'm making quick comments on them at http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/ )
But today I can't seem to get any of those topics to assemble into a point I can actually make in this limited space.
So let's talk a little more about how and why it happens that the Romance field in general (perhaps the Alien Romance, Paranormal Romance field in particular) just can't get the public respect it deserves.
I've said before, and I believe some of the others posting here have also noticed, that Science Fiction became much more publicly acceptable, more accessible, and attracted feature film money and even won Emmy and Oscars where SF never did before, after Star Trek hit the TV screen. Today, when I say, "I'm a science fiction writer," I get a totally different reaction than I did even right after Star Trek.
Daily Variety has a RAVE (and I mean RAVE!!!) review of the new Star Trek movie. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117940096.html?categoryid=31&cs=1
What Alien Romance needs, then is a TV show.
MAYBE WE HAVE ONE! Maybe there's something in these 2 TV shows that we can build on. If you don't watch TV, you can browse through these shows online.
Reaper TV Series http://www.cwtv.com/shows/reaper
Supernatural TV Series http://www.cwtv.com/shows/supernatural
Neilsen Ratings for Reaper and Supernatural for mid-April indicate (if I'm reading this page right) about 2 million people watch it live or immediately after on their recording device. I watch them several weeks after on my DVR. Keep in mind there are about 310 million people in the USA, (2010 is a census year). CW is a broadcast network and it may not be on all cable systems. Scifi channel is cable, but not on all cable channels.
Still, statistics are showing that with all the different ways to spend your evenings, a lower percentage of the population is watching TV. The general demographic of TV watchers is growing older (i.e. young people prefer games and their computers). So 2 million is a fairly respectable audience, given the venue. I'm looking at this not for popularity, but for taste.
Reaper and Supernatural seem to be doing better than Smallville which I also love (but not as much as I loved Lois and Clark).
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2009/04/21/top-cw-primetime-shows-april-13-19-2009/17139 is one of my sources.
REAPER is the one about the young guy whose father sold his soul to the Devil. The Devil now is billing himself as the young man's father, and has entrapped him into collecting souls that "escaped" from Hell. (the whole game could be rigged -- conspiracies within conspiracies).
Choosing Setting is one of the topics rattling in my mind: all about how a writer chooses a setting, how the plot adjusts when you shift the setting, and what commercial advantages you get from settings. Reaper's Setting is a do-it-yourself chain store, and most of the main characters work there.
The show is about the relationships these young people develop, and what all that has to do with Evil, and how Evil weasels its way into lives.
We've had some very interesting entries on this blog about how titillating the BAD BOY image is. Tough guys, bad boys and the alpha male seem to be attractive in a visceral way. None of the human characters on REAPER are alpha male or female. The Devil is the alpha in the show. And the ongoing demon characters are all non-alpha and not very Evil either.
The recent episode of REAPER that brought the Romance aspect to mind was about a demon lurking in an old silver mine, a soul that Son of the Devil had to collect in a "vessel" shaped this time like a hand grenade. (each week, the vessel he collects a soul in has a different form -- they go for the funniest thing they can think of.)
A character they are developing is an escaped renegade demon who takes the form of a nice tall blond girl in love with the Hispanic lead character (short, dark, handsome guy).
In this episode, the 3 boys and 2 of the 3 girls (sans female demon who wanted to be alone to consume a Llama, but later comes to the town flying in her demon shape) went to this deserted silver mining town (in excellent repair) to collect the soul that lurks in the old mine and kills people.
SPOILER
In the end, the boy whose father is The Devil has to decide if a human who has been protecting the demon lives or dies.
He tells the human that he doesn't have to die. He can live a new, full, satisfying life. BUT - when arguing with the demon who wants to kill the human because the human has killed her lover (but that didn't really happen), the son of the Devil says to the demon that she should let him live because he'll have to live with the knowledge of all the horrible things he's done, and that will be torture.
Later, the demon says she found the Son of the Devil sexy because he's turning Evil! (but this demon isn't supposed to be Evil anymore)
At the end, (which my DVR cut off at a strategic spot), the Son of the Devil and his girlfriend are talking over what happened. She breaks off her relationship with him because Evil has invaded every part of his life.
She realized this because of the events in the ghost town. The ghost town excursion was orchestrated by the Devil, who is now proud of his Son who can take any blow no matter how severe.
The scripts for this show have been getting better written! You can actually see the point, understand them and discuss them instead of just laughing.
As they go season to season, the ensemble cast of REAPER has begun the pairing-off dance that we saw done so well on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
As idiotic as the premise and most of the execution of this teen-comedy has seemed to me, I actually have some hope for this show. The impact will be seen as the audience that loves this show grows up and looks for the kind of thing we would call Romance. But I suspect a lot of married adults are watching this show just for the laughs.
Supernatural is likewise popular with just under 2 million viewers, involves two brothers, and The Devil complete with demons, minions and characters who say they are Angels. But the plot requires these (handsome) brothers to break off every Relationship they get into except perhaps with demons.
The existence and survival of these two shows tells us a lot about the forming and flowing of audiences, and the appetite for Relationship which will eventually bespeak the issues of Romance and the HEA ending.
I'm perpetually puzzling over the "Soul Mate" aspect of Romance, and this particular episode of REAPER brought in the sexual attractiveness of Evil, which we play with as the Bad Boy.
And these two shows -- which I thought would surely be cancelled halfway through their first seasons -- are expressing a philosophy of life that resonates with a broad swatch of the TV viewing audience. I have a lot to say about what this popularity says about the present and the future as shaped by viewers of these shows.
There's a whole lot going on in this world, yet Romance survives. Perhaps the question is, "Does humanity need Romance to survive?" I'd say it's our only hope.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
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