Vampire Disjunction

I've kept up with the TV series THE VAMPIRE DIARIES despite the heroine's disappearance from the show. (The character was magically consigned to suspended animation.) At present Damon, one of the co-starring vampire brothers, has "switched off his humanity," not for the first time. Under compulsion from this season's villain, an ancient, powerful Siren, he's had to perform terrible acts. To escape the guilt and pain, he "flipped" his "humanity switch" so that he feels no emotions and therefore can't suffer. Apparently all vampires have this capability, since others in the series have done the same thing. With their humanity voluntarily turned off—apparently requiring only a simple act of will—they have intellect, sensation, and appetite but no feelings, positive or negative. They simply don't care. While suppressing one's humanity is easy, reawakening it requires an agonizing intervention by some other person, especially since no vampire who has undergone this change wants it reversed.

The dichotomy between vampires with and without souls on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER functions similarly. According to that show's mythos, the creation of a vampire displaces the victim's soul, leaving the body possessed by a demon. As Buffy tells a character in an early episode, "That's not your friend, it's the thing that killed him." This "demon-animated corpse" thesis becomes problematic with the introduction of Spike, whose personality and behavior seem to have definite continuity with his human life, and he's certainly capable of loving in his own way. Nevertheless, it's established that "normal" vampires don't have souls. Angel appears to be unique in that respect until Spike also becomes re-souled late in the series. As far as we can tell, "soul" seems equivalent to "conscience." Unlike in THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, where suppression of humanity turns off emotions, soulless vampires in the BUFFY universe have a wide range of emotions, often violently passionate even if usually negative.

Both of these plot devices remind me of the junct-disjunct contrast in the Sime-Gen series. A vampire deprived of soul or humanity (which seem to entail much the same thing, allowing for differences between the series' vampire mythos) is analogous to a junct Sime. In these vampire universes, regaining a soul or embracing one's remaining traces of humanity resembles disjunction. Remaining or becoming junct represents the easy way, while disjuncting is usually terribly difficult and painful, just as accepting the return of soul or humanity can subject a vampire to great suffering. One big difference is that junct Simes are still human, and many of them want to disjunct. No vampire who has turned off his or her humanity wants it switched on, and BUFFY vampires hardly ever wish for souls. (Angel finds his a source of torment, since its return awakens his conscience and therefore makes him suffer guilt for the evil he has done.) Spike, the notable exception, seeks the restoration of his soul out of devotion to Buffy. In MAHOGANY TRINROSE, it's discovered that a drug made from the trinrose can ease the disjunction process, so that one of the characters fears Simes might begin to think going junct is no big deal, because "I can always disjunct again." Similarly, Damon on THE VAMPIRE DIARIES has had his humanity switched on and off a couple of times, and Angel regained his soul, lost it, and got it back again. In both cases, we have to wonder how much guilt the re-souled or humanity-embracing vampire should legitimately bear for acts he performed when devoid of soul or humanity. At those times, was he "not himself"?

Neither of these programs explicitly defines what humanity or a soul actually is. In the BUFFY universe, a soul is referred to as almost a thing, a concrete entity that can be removed and replaced like a physical object. When a vampire lacks a soul, has that part of him or her been sent to the "Heaven" where Buffy thought she was between her death and her restoration to life? Does the vampire's disembodied soul have any trace of consciousness, wherever it is? We're never told. In THE VAMPIRE DIARIES, "humanity" seems to be more a state of being than an entity. The "flipping a switch" imagery likens it to an electric current. While it would be more satisfying if these series defined their terms with some precision, at least they do foreground existential and ontological questions in interesting ways.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Real-Life "Superpowers"

Here are three lists of real-life extraordinary human anomalies from the "Cracked" website:

DNA Mutations That Make Ordinary People X-Men

Personally, I wouldn't classify genes for adventurousness and happiness as superpowers, simply normal variations. The Argentinians who have a supernormal tolerance for arsenic and the Inuit who process dietary fats differently from the rest of us, though, strike me as bona-fide extraordinary.

A sample of abilities everybody has in infancy but loses as he or she grows up:

5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies

A recurring theme of these infant "powers" is that growth requires pruning and focusing so that some abilities get lost as a necessary part of adjustment to the needs of adult life. For instance, pre-verbal babies can hear and produce all the sounds possible to the human vocal apparatus; when they learn to talk, however, they "forget" how to process the sounds their native language doesn't use. Reminds me of the scene in MARY POPPINS where we're told all babies understand the language of birds, yet as they learn human speech, they lose that gift.

How about a man who can touch live wires with impunity because he has seven to eight times greater resistance to electricity than the average person? Or the autistic savant with perfect visual memory, who can draw a whole city in accurate detail after seeing it once? The man who can control his autonomic body functions so well he can sit almost naked on ice without freezing and the man with reflexes faster than the human eye can follow also fit credibly into the "superpower" category:

6 Real People with Superpowers

If the environment changed radically enough in some distant future era, could one of these traits become so important to survival that it spread widely through the population, making individuals who carried that gene an elite group? In the back story of Tanith Lee's SABELLA, a human-like species evolved a form of gender dimorphism in which women fed on the blood of their mates, so that the population could survive dire, long-term food scarcity. How great a change in the environment would be required to generate alterations in human biology this extreme? Or the tendril-bearing, telepathic mutants of A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN or the Simes and Gens of Jacqueline's far-future Earth?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Should You Make Up A Pen Name - Part II

Last week we looked at Sarah A. Hoyt and her multitude of bylines in various genres, a list that's still growing and not causing her much problem yet.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html

This week, I have a note from a member of Backlist eBooks (http://backlistebooks.com  which has an Amazon store which lists most of the members' titles http://astore.amazon.com/backlebook-20 ), Patricia Rosemoore, who is pondering a career with multiple bylines woven through a collaboration, a career that's still growing and branching out.

If you're just starting out in publishing, even if you are tossing out one or two trivial projects into the ebook market to make your bones, you really should ponder Patricia Rosemoore's point of view, make it your own, see what your career will look like in retrospect, before you type in a byline under the title of your first work.

Even if you've already started publishing, it might not be too late to re-think your overall business branding strategy for the body of work you intend to create and the audience you expect will discover that body of work amidst the flood of ebooks.

Patricia Rosemoor writes Dangerous Love; Kindle ebook "reprints": available from Amazon -- The McKenna Legacy:SEE ME IN YOUR DREAMS, TELL ME NO LIES, TOUCH ME IN THE DARK; from Harlequin Intrigue: BRAZEN; http://PatriciaRosemoor.com

-------QUOTE--------
My former writing partner and I are going to try to get rights back from Harper and Dell and maybe even from Silhouette. We wrote as Roslynn Patrick and Roslynn Griffith for Harper, Lynn Patrick for Dell (and for HQ) and Jeanne Rose for Silhouette. And I write as Patricia Rosemoor.

Here's my question--how would any of you who have multiple identities handle the backlist?

Should we pick one of the pseudonyms or use the originals? The only problem with using one pseudonym is that the books aren't all alike. Both Dell and HQ were Lynn Patrick -- some humor with our romance, a few with light suspense. But Silhouette Shadows were the precursor to Nocturne and the Harpers are really dark RS, three of the five being paranormal.

Whatever we choose to do, I'll probably want the cover to read something like (in small print) Patricia Rosemoor and Linda Sweeney writing as (and in big print) selected pseudonym. The idea is that since I have 60 some books as Patricia Rosemoor, and since I'm already backlisting a few Patricia Rosemoor books, it would probably generate more sales that way. For example if someone looks up Rosemoor on Amazon, they'll get those other pseudonyms.

Or is that too weird? What is anyone else doing?

Thanks,
Patricia

---END QUOTE---

So far I haven't seen more in depth discussion of this problem with definitive answers.

The problem is that most widely published writers have this problem in one form or another.

As discussed last week, bylines are often created at request or demand of Agents and/or Editors -- i.e. of marketers, not readers or writers.

And those bylines were created by Agents and Editors who never planned for the ebook world, or the self-republishing world, or Amazon's computers with tags, customer reviews, and so on.

How can you plan for what will be twenty years from now? 

What will change and what will stay the same?

The only answer I have so far is that you can't.

My sometime collaborator on my Sime~Gen Universe novels didn't plan for Amazon, but their system is working out splendidly for us.

We put both our bylines on each of our collaborations, but followed the academic convention and put the originating author first.  That is, when I first-drafted a novel that Jean collaborated on, my name came first.  When she first drafted a novel that I collaborated on, her name came first.  When we wrote independently in Sime~Gen, the byline was the single name.

The result drove bookstores totally nuts (the more they computerized, the nuttier it got), and we sold really well only at the science fiction and mystery specialty stories where the owner and clerks actually read the novels and recommended them to specific customers.  We gathered a lot of librarians, teachers, bookstore managers and owners who became fans.  .

Oddly, Amazon's method is now working wondrously well in just the way the indie bookstores did, recommending to those who would otherwise miss a title because of the odd bylines.

Jean Lorrah wrote a number of Star Trek novels for Pocket (which are all now in ebook, too) plus a series called Savage Empire, also being reissued by Wildside Press in ebook and paper.

I have a number of other titles, my Vampire Romances from St. Martin's Press, and others with complicated publishing histories including translations.  And now, two collections of my short stories have been issued, Through The Moon Gate and Science Is Magic Spelled Backwards.  

But the publisher, Wildside Press's Borgo imprint, is re-issuing the Sime~Gen novels in order of publication not in internal chronology order because numbered series in order of publication now sell better as ebooks!  (they have the computer evidence to prove it!)

So here's how they bill the Sime~Gen Universe on the inside cover listing:

THE SIME~GEN SERIES from The Borgo Press
House of Zeor, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#1)
Unto Zeor, Forever, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#2)
First Channel, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#3)
Mahogany Trinrose, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#4)
Channel’s Destiny, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#5)
RenSime, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#6)
Ambrov Keon, by Jean Lorrah (#7)
Zelerod’s Doom, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah (#8)

AND THEN NEW ONES!

Personal Recognizance, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#9)
The Story Untold and Other Stories, by Jean Lorrah (#10)
To Kiss or to Kill, by Jean Lorrah (#11)
The Farris Channel, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#12)

Now, as most readers here know, Sime~Gen is not a "series" but a Universe.

It covers several thousand years of future-history, and only a few of the books revisit a given character's life.  Most are set in different eras, to tell the story of the Universe through the intensely personal growth experiences of a given individual who lives in that time.

The Universe postulates (invisibly to the reader) that reincarnation is real, so many of the characters in later books are reincarnations of previous characters, Souls that have learned hard lessons in previous lives and now are free to go on to new lessons (harder ones).

The internal chronology is cast onto what we call the Unity Calendar, which actually has a Year Zero:
------------

- 533 Unity --First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 518 Unity – Channel’s Destiny by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 468 Unity – The Farris Channel by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
- 20 Unity – Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah
- 15 Unity – House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
0 Unity Calendar - Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah
1 Unity - To Kiss Or To Kill by Jean Lorrah
1 Unity - The Story Untold And Other Sime~Gen Stories by Jean Lorrah
132 Unity – Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
152 Unity – Mahogany Trinrose by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
224 Unity – “Operation High Time” by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
232 Unity – RenSime by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
245 Unity – Personal Recognizance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
---------------

So why am I belaboring this chronology issue in a blog about creating a pen name?

Because it all goes together, and needs to be considered if you're starting a series.

What's selling now, really well, is Series that are published in the internal chronological order.  I've reviewed a large number of those.  It's probably connected to the shift from the "anthology" TV series which had to be viewable in any order because of technical broadcast reasons, to the "story arc" TV series which is possible because of DVD's, On Demand, and Tivo.

But will it always be that way?  Can the computerization of databases and google algorhytms make some other method work better for readers?

The Pen Name issue is all about letting the reader find what the reader wants at that particular moment.  Kindle allows instant gratification by mail-order! 

One of the methods we're using to help readers figure out buying Sime~Gen in Kindle and/or paper is the Amazon store approach. 

We are making a store with the NEW Sime~Gen novels, along with a page for other titles by Jean Lorrah and by me. 

Here's the URL:

http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20 

Consider - will you need an Amazon store? (or a "store" from some other outfit, like B&N?) or all of the above?  What will you call it?

We're trying to keep our store as simple as possible, with more of the stories behind the various covers and editions explicated on the SimeGen Group on facebook.

The Amazon Store is a tool nobody would ever have predicted twenty years prior to its appearance. 

What tools will you have to market your body of work?  What flexibility can you build into your concept that will make that tool easy and natural to use?

Does byline matter? Does sub-title matter? Does order of publication matter? Does interval between new books matter? (i.e. should you write 10 novels before letting #1 come out?)

What is the best way to leverage today's marketing tools? 

Here's a blog by a writer that I was pointed to by @victoriastrauss on twitter:

http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/best-practices-for-amazon-ebook-sales/

That's today's Amazon - and if you read that blog, you'll see how "marketing; branding; byline" all fit into it.

So will tailoring your fiction to that method limit what you can do with tomorrow's tools?

How will social networking change the underlying principles of marketing and branding?  And what comes after social networking?

What should you be preparing for?

Oh, we have a lot of work to do on this blog!  And as we work, we may stumble on the key to that whole genre-prestige issue. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com