Genre: The Root Of All Passion by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Genre: The Root Of All Passion
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Previous parts in this series on Genre:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/genre-root-of-all-evil.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/genre-root-of-all-confusion.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/genre-root-of-all-decisions.html

And here is a July 2014 update on e-book Bestsellers on Amazon -- showing how few of the top selling e-books are put up by a single person rather than a publisher.  Small publishers do better than self-publishing for authors. A small publisher can offer an array of books all narrowly focused to a particular readership, drilling down to the root of passion for those readers.

http://authorearnings.com/july-2014-author-earnings-report/

And now we'll look at genre as the root of all passion.

I found this article when klout.com emailed me they had a new interface design, so I went over to klout.com to check that out.  (showing I had a klout of 56)

http://io9.com/the-real-reason-why-you-pass-judgment-on-other-peoples-1521078441

The article on io9.com is a couple excerpted paragraphs from Salon.com -- here is an excerpt of the excerpt.

--------from io9.com ----------
.... The result of all this baggage is a preposterous, resentful pecking order in which readers get way too much pleasure out of pissing on other readers' preferences and/or jumping, on the slightest pretext, to the conclusion that their own are being ridiculed.  ....
-------END QUOTE----------

Here's the whole, original article:
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/07/is_the_literary_world_elitist/
The title on Salon.com is
 Is the literary world elitist?

What readers who take offense at unfamiliar words and challenging books are telling us about our culture

-----excerpt from end of full article-----------
If, however, I did fear, deep inside, that my inability to appreciate any celebrated book betrayed my complete intellectual and aesthetic inadequacy, I would probably be pretty angry. I’d feel the need to stick my oar in and announce that “The Adventures of Augie March” is actually a crap novel, that it is objectively boring and that the critics who praise it are charlatans. Even if I couldn’t explain exactly why I dislike it, I might want to register that dislike because somebody should be speaking out against this hoax being perpetrated on the public by the literary establishment. I’d resent that establishment and the snooty, Bellovian way it expresses itself, with fancy words like “crepuscular.” And I’d want everyone else who, like me, could see through this emperor’s new clothes to know that they are not alone, and get them to tell me I’m not alone. It’s usually those with the least faith in their own opinions who become the most outraged when the consensus does not agree with them.

If I did feel that way, it also probably wouldn’t be my fault. If I had such attitudes, chances are it would be because at some early — or even later — stage in my life, someone with similar anxieties would have taken them out on me and made me feel small and stupid and tacky. And to make myself feel better, I might do something similar to someone else: for example, mock my little brother for reading George R.R. Martin. Petty abuses like this get passed on in pretty much the same way the bigger ones do. All the same, even if we’re not to blame for our insecurities, we are responsible for recognizing them for what they are. And for growing up and getting over it.

--------end excerpt-----------------

What leaps out at me is, "It's usually those with the least faith in their own opinions who become the most outraged when the consensus does not agree with them." 

Faith in one's own opinion often comes about when you, yourself, have worked the problem, systematically applying the axioms and postulates of your own personal philosophy and/or religion -- an internally consistent theory about Life, the Universe, and Everything -- and arrived at your own understanding.  When that much exertion results in a conclusion, there can't be much intellectual insecurity about the conclusion.

When, however, your opinions are based on what other people tell you your opinion should be, there is little chance you will have anything but intellectual insecurity and go through life striking out in impotent rage.  

From the first quote from io9.com, what leaps out at me is "resentful pecking order."

We all recognize that "pecking order" in the way Romance is "pecked at" especially for the HEA. 

Almost any plot-development based on a thoughtful evaluation of another person's emotional reality will be vilified by anti-Happily-Ever-After devotees. 

This article on Salon.com suggests that those who oppose the exploration of the paths to an HEA do so because they are intellectually insecure in their rejection of the existence of the HEA.  Could that explain the viciousness of the attack?

I believe that reading Romance genre sensitizes readers to the way the world looks from another person's point of view -- something all good Literature does.  Romance is not a genre to be looked down on, but a Literature to be looked up at.

The core essence of Romance is a heightened sensitivity to how another person feels, a sensitivity to emotion that pierces the intellect. 

Romance is a state of mind as well as heart, an altered consciousness that we can attain most easily when under the dissolving impact of a Neptune transit. 

Older astrology books taught that the Neptune transit signified a state of mind in which one's perceptions of reality were "blurred" or dissolved in a way that made one's views "false."

But the higher truth is that if you have exerted yourself in training your mind and emotions to work on a theory of reality that is without internal contradictions, then the Neptune transits responsible for Love At First Sight will sharpen your judgement of human nature and your ability to perceive the emotions of others and plumb the depths of character.

You will see that Love and know, at the first glimpse, what you're looking at.

Read what I've said here again and note the interweaving of "thought" and "mind" and various references to emotion such as "feel" blended into "know."

There is a psychological study which asserts that some people perceive the world through emotion, while others perceive through thought or logic -- and that this cognitive style is inherent in you, not under your control, not a choice, not something you can acquire or change.

There are spiritual approaches to understanding the state of being human that encompass both the emotion based reality, and the logical or intellectual based reality. 

Such spiritual disciplines strive to get the emotional and logical faculties to interact in a balanced way. 

I suspect that exactly where that "logic/emotion balance point" is for an individual is a matter of inherent traits, but getting to that balance point is a struggle for everyone.

One essential ingredient in a life securely ensconced in such a "logic/emotion balance point" is the presence of the right opposite number with the complementary attributes -- e.g. The Spouse. 

There is also another tenet of classic Astrology that holds that the physical appearance of a person is indicated in the natal chart.  For example, people with long-shaped faces generally have a prominent Capricorn or Saturn or both. 

Note President Obama seems (by the published official Birth Certificate) to have Saturn in its own sign Capricorn with Jupiter in conjunction, emphasizing his Capricorn nature.  (his Sun is in Leo.)

Now check out the proportions of his face -- also his slender build is typical of strong Saturn or Capricorn  -- his reputation for being "no-drama-Obama" (such a Capricorn trait, though Leo is famous for drama) was acquired while that conjunction was activated by transit -- and he was able to convince the Nation that he would be a great manager for the Executive (Capricorn) Branch because he looks (and sounds) like a Manager -- which is what Capricorn is really good at, what Saturn is all about -- organization - while Leo is about commanding. 

So Love At First Sight might be based on seeing that complementary natal chart, that Spouse material, in another person's appearance. 

Love at First Sight might also have an aura component -- a psychic perceptibility activated in a unique way by this particular individual.  Pheromones would figure in that.

That's the bottom line in any Romance Novel -- two unique individuals fitting together, hand in glove, and recognizing that fit, even if only subconsciously.

Now consider the problem of resolving the Romance Triangle situation -- where two different characters are  opposite numbers for a third. 

A woman beset by two lovers has to choose one of them.  Each one is "perfect" because each completes her in a unique way.  So she has to choose one on the basis of which side of her personality she wants shape her life.

The Romantic Triangle novel gives the writer the opportunity to display decision making tools, both cognitive and emotional.

One thing I've noted in our current world is a lack of decision-making precision, a lack of understanding of the process of decision making, and a lack of hard-practice at the process.

That lack has led to a distrust of the individual's judgement.  You see this in things like trying to make a single rule that everyone follows before pulling a Fire Alarm at a school -- or a whole list of procedures that have to be followed in a particular situation.  It's as if nobody dares risk relying on another person's judgement for anything. 

That's the world your reader is living in, so consider it carefully.  Small wonder there's intellectual insecurity. 

All real-life decisions are a leap into the dark, deep-end of the pool -- you are diving in blind, you do not have sufficient information, nor will you ever have it.  Risk-Risk everything's a risk, and intellectual insecurity leaves one with a paralyzing terror in the face of possible failure. 

But you must use all the information you have to arrive at a decision that is the best you can make (logically), so that in retrospect, no matter what goes wrong you will not waste resources revisiting that decision but devote all your energy to solving the current problem.  When you have become a strong character with strong decision making skills, you can boldly go where no one has gone before with the confidence that you can surmount any challenge that dares to meet you.

This kind of decision making process is most evident in Romance novels, and thus Romance gives readers the most practice you can get vicariously.

This exercise in virtual decision making is especially salutary when the writer can step the reader through a rigorous logical evaluation of a character, and then through an equally rigorous emotional evaluation of that character. 

Bringing the two branches of the decision tree together in the final pages of the novel lets the reader arrive at their own answer to the question "which one should I marry?" before the character decides -- and then the reader can test their resolution against the main character's resolution and go away arguing the case.

Even writers can re-think which two characters should get together finally.  You all read about J. K. Rowling rethinking Harry Potter's link-up?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/10/jk-rowling-harry-potter-heresy-ron-hermione

As the Romance field has grown, and branched into hybrid genres such as Paranormal Romance or Interstellar Adventure-Romance, the opportunity for series that move the characters through the "I love you" point to the "I do" point, and on to the "We're pregnant" point and even beyond to the "I don't know what to do with your child!" point.

When the structure of a Relationship, or the destiny (I married a medical student; now he's a successful doctor and I feel like a widow, or single-mother) seems just plain wrong for your personality and ambitions -- what do you do about it?

Did you choose the wrong one of your two suitors?  What is the life of the other man's wife like today?

How do you work this problem?  How do you define this problem? 

The permutations and variations on this essential life conflict have barely been touched on by the Romance field.

My favorite of the current works-in-progress on this theme is Gini Koch's ALIEN series.  Book 9, ALIEN COLLECTIVE came out in May 2014:

http://www.amazon.com/Alien-Collective-Gini-Koch-ebook/dp/B00FX7LUUY/

Kitty Kat, the heroine of the ALIEN novels, is an ordinary human at the start, acquires some new traits along the way, but even when kicked way off her center, she returns to her own stable intellect/emotion point and continues to function.  Her marriage to an alien is as much in spite-of as because-of, the insane hyper-sexuality between them.  She chose this man not just for the sex, but because of his strong character that complemented her own.

We often grapple with the definition of a strong character.  Editors mean one thing by the term, writers another, readers yet another.  There is a very real core to all three definitions.

What it takes to be a "strong character" is balance at a stable point inside you where Intellect and Emotion conjoin, co-mingle, and become indistinguishable from one another.  Such a person, Saint-Class-Human, would have all emotional impulses not "under control" but "programmed" to give intellectually correct answers.  Such a person can leap before looking and always nail the landing.

For a strong character, every life-choice must satisfy both emotional preferences and intellectual honesty.  A "strong character" is on his/her way to that saint-class-human. 

Even if the character has a morality or an ethic that is non-human, or what the reader would consider criminal, or culturally unacceptable, if that character's emotional responses are stringently consistent with his/her intellectual standards (impeccable logic, given the premises) then the character will be seen as "strong."  Not stubborn -- strong. 

Such a character, with fully integrated emotions and thinking, will absorb the impact of shattering events with just a bit of recoil, then surge back into the fray with renewed determination.  That's what strong characters do.  They don't give up.  They don't give in.  They don't crumble. 

Where does such "strength" of character come from?  It comes from the stability at the balance point where emotion and logic join into a single, clear assessment of any life-situation. 

For such a fully integrated character, a Neptune transit (falling in love, ga-ga infatuated, unable to think of anything else) will be FUN, not an occasion for actions destructive to the life or career that's been built so far.  What has been built so far will be strong enough to absorb the impact of True Love, integrate the new Spouse into all the on-going affairs, and make progress even while courting.

A Romance novel gains plausibility when these improbable Events happen to an integrated personality. 
Stories like that "work" because in reality, we all know how the integrated personalities around us seem to just sail through vicissitudes unscathed while everyone else is smashed to pieces.

A person may appear to have a strong Saturn or Capricorn (look like a great manager) but not have that "strength of character" that can be achieved only by stabilizing at that emotion/logic balance point.

A lover will judge not just by good looks, but also by performance under stress. 

That's why we love Science Fiction Romance where lovers get to see their prospective spouse under the impact of bizarre, unthinkable, and screw-ball stress.  Smart women flee from men who crumble.  Smart men flee from women who crumble.  We aren't all that smart, so we love reading about smart characters. 

But with practice, with determination and unrelenting striving, one can get to be that smart.

That's the hope all humans harbor.  You can't change "who" you are -- but you can be a strong version of you, rather than a weak version.

Reading good Romance can provide the vision of what you could be, if you sweat it out and train rigorously to find your emotion/logic balance point.  Nobody can tell you where yours is.  You have to risk everything to find it.  What do you risk?  Reliving that emotional pain referenced in  "Is the literary world elitist?  What readers who take offense at unfamiliar words and challenging books are telling us about our culture"   that triggered your version of intellectual insecurity.

Either intellectual or emotional insecurity vitiates the strength of character necessary to cope with our real world.  By reading Romance, and especially the hybrid genres of Romance, you can evaluate and assess where inside you those insecurities reside, what caused them, and then find what you can do to confront your demons and exorcise them. 

In other words, you can find out how to become the kind of "strong character" you so admire in novels. 
Concentrate on reading the writers who have the aspect of strength you have set yourself to master.

If there is any criticism of Romance Genre that actually holds up well on scrutiny, it's that many authors of Romance do not themselves train in rigorous internal consistency of philosophy that comes automatically when you live at that stable emotion/logic balance point.  But many of the most popular Romance writers do.  Very often, they get to their balance point by writing Romance! 

Beginning Romance writers just (tell rather than show that this character falls in love with that character on first sight -- and there is no way readers can figure out what "he sees in her" or "she sees in him" because there is nothing to see. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-2-whats.html

This harks back to THEME that I talk about so much.  The writer has to have a thematic rationale for Love At First Sight that the writer wants to explain in this novel -- where does it come from, why does it happen, does it really mean anything in the long-run?  Religion can be the explanation, or karma, or life-is-random, or "I'm helpless before my carnal emotions."  But the writer has to be saying something with that First Sight Plot Event in such a way that the reader can "hear" it being said, and later "see" it working in their real world.

The weak character is "helpless before carnal emotions."  If the character becomes a strong character as a result of striving with carnal emotions, you have a novel series, because this kind of "strength" -- that comes from a totally consistent philosophy of life, consistent with emotional reality and consistent with logical reality -- takes decades of hard living to achieve (sometimes in a past life).

The best source of plot-events to throw at your weak character who is developing strength is the typical Pluto Transit event that I have, in previous posts, identified as the source of Melodrama.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html

In real life, solid relationships seldom result from lust-at-first-sight where the couple has incompatible personalities.

But even that does happen -- really!  Sometimes, such relationships result in 50th Anniversaries with hoards of grandchildren swarming about.

It's a crazy world, and lots of highly improbable things happen.  Such improbabilities are the real life venues for stories.  You see it in biographies and autobiographies. 

Love Conquers All.  It really does.  And that fact is a mystery humans can't help but probe. 

Romance is all about emotion -- and intellectual insecurity (as noted in this article) is a condition that blends both emotion and intellect, body and mind.

You can't have ROMANCE without "mind" -- but you can have sex and lust without "mind."

The Romance Genre is by definition all about finding that balance point within the character's personality where intellect and emotion blend harmoniously.  And the Love Conquers All premise behind the Romance Genre is all about how that balance point is attained by partnering with the right opposite number.

A coupling that facilitates the advancement of each character toward their own balance point exerts a strong influence on the course of Events around them -- and perhaps on the destiny of Humanity and perhaps the Universe, depending how mystical you want to get.

Showing rather than assuming or telling this process of balancing intellect and emotion can make Romance genre novels more accessible to those who can't believe in the reality of Happily Ever After.

When you mix Science Fiction with Romance, you can demonstrate the kinds of balance points that are favored by a sensitive dominance of intellect over emotion.  You can show how emotion can be trained by the intellect to recognize and react to that which is consistent with the philosophy or religion the character has consciously chosen. 

Achieving that intellect/emotion balance point and thus becoming "strong" characters, a couple can indeed and in reality, live a Happily Ever After ending.  Just contemplate those 50th Wedding Anniversary celebrations -- some people do make it to the HEA.

The easiest way to get to the HEA is to vanquish your Intellectual Insecurities -- as delineated in this article I cited at the top of this post:

 Thursday, Feb 6, 2014 05:00 PM -0700
Is the literary world elitist?
What readers who take offense at unfamiliar words and challenging books are telling us about our culture
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/07/is_the_literary_world_elitist/

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Targeting a Readership Part 7: Guest Post by Valerie Valdes

Last week we explored genre and archetypes with respect to Science Fiction Romance targeting a specific type of reader.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/04/targeting-readership-part-6.html

That post has links to previous posts in the Targeting A Readership series. 

On a #scifichat one Friday, Valerie Valdes and I had a brief exchange like so:

JLichtenberg : To be a good springboard for a story, a science doesn't have to be "hard," just well known among intended readership #scifichat 12:32pm, Feb 22 from TweetChat
valerievaldes

valerievaldes: @JLichtenberg I'd go so far as to coin a phrase and maybe call it an intentioned reader? You create interest, I create intent. #scifichat 12:35pm, Feb 22 from Web
JLichtenberg

JLichtenberg: @valerievaldes #scifichat I love that - "intentioned reader" - write a guest post on it for http://t.co/YR5WzTuuLF ?

So she wrote the following for us to ponder.   She had not seen last week's post and I hadn't mentioned the post I was discussing last week in my post.  This came out of the blue while #scifichat was discussing a definition for sociological science fiction. 

-------GUEST POST---------

A lot of writers worry about reaching a particular, intended audience with a work that may require specialized knowledge to be fully appreciated. We walk a fine line between trying to appeal to people who aren’t avid followers of the latest news in scientific advancements, or scholars of medieval animal husbandry, or whatever it is that drives us to obsession, and everyone else--a much larger group, to be sure.


Many times, though, we needn’t be so concerned about reaching that select, elusive clique of intelligentsia. Introducing something novel to a reader unfamiliar with the topic won’t necessarily shut them out. Instead of failing to target an intended reader, you may instead create an intentioned reader: one who is so intrigued by your subject that they intentionally educate themselves on it in order to better understand and enjoy your work.


This phenomenon isn’t restricted to any genre: a story may spark interest in history as easily as science or technology. For example, the slipstream works of Jo Walton encourage research into real history in order to better understand her modifications to the existing chronology and historical figures. As another example, Peter Watts’ interweaving of geothermal energy production, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering in Starfish may find a handful of readers knowledgeable about all three topics, but more likely will reach people interested or educated in one (or none!) but eager to learn more about the others.


As the movie quote goes, “If you build it, they will come.” The trick, of course, is to build something worth coming to, in a way that will spark the interest that creates an intentioned reader. A good story, not matter how obscure the topic, will never fail to find an audience.

Cheers,

Valerie Valdes
http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/

------end Guest Post ------------

Don't just think about what Valerie has said here.  Think hard about what it means THAT she just blurted this out in response to my invitation (in less than half an hour!).

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Believing In Happily Ever After Part 7 - The Writer's Lifestyle and Voice

Part 6 (which has a link to part 5 which links to previous parts of this series) is dated April 10, 2012:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-6.html

At the end of Part 6 we began talking about the trajectory of a writer's career and how it can be affected by decisions about what to write.

Look again at that quote from the screenwriting blog discussed in Part 6

http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/screenwriting-101-jonathan-lemkin.html 

If you take "the wrong job" just because you've let your lifestyle drive you into needing a check, you will find the quality of your work deteriorating and it'll be harder to get another job (by this, the screenwriter is talking about WORK FOR HIRE -the exact business model that is freaking out L. J. Smith's fans.)

Here's something I know about Marion Zimmer Bradley.  She did take just anything that came along, writing, editing, odd jobs, anything!  She had kids to feed and bills to pay and she scrambled and scraped for years before the career triumph of having one of her novels made into a TV miniseries.

If you've read the Darkover novels in publishing order, you know that the quality of her work increased over the years.

But she did what that screenwriter is advising writers not to do.

What's the difference? 

Over her lifetime, Marion was a practitioner of many religions, an expert at considerable depth at many philosophies and worldviews.  She understood Tarot, Astrology, Magic, Christianity, Paganism, and much more.  She understood what they all have in common, the conclusion that behind it all there is a strong Hand that guides events. 

The theory of what that Hand is, where it comes from, how it manifests, how it treats this person differently from that person, etc etc -- all these mysteries of life, was always an open question for her, but one thing she always knew throughout all her adventures in life -- something is 'assigning' us our problems, and solving them makes us better, stronger and more able to solve the next one.

At least, that's what I saw (remember the commentary above here about memoir writing and facts) -- that's what I saw in her. 

That basic concept about the nature of reality is woven into all the Darkover novels she wrote, and it is something I think I was born with.  And so when I encountered the Darkover novels, I resonated to the stories in a way that was different from how I responded to other novels written at that time.

Marion, for the worldbuilding behind Darkover, invented a term for the psychic effects we experience as real but which somehow just can't be proved (or disproved actually). 

Science as we know it today is based on a "law" that Francis Bacon popularized, the system of empirical science based on the law of cause and effect.

Our whole Aristotelian worldview (I do hope you remember that from the Tarot posts) is based on cause and effect, establishing that when you do this, then subsequently because you did this, that happens.  This causes that.

Current politically correct philosophy insists that because cause/effect has worked so well to improve life on earth, that therefore there can and must be nothing else in reality except cause/effect.

Any phenomenon that is observed that can not be analyzed down to a cause/effect basis just isn't real.  Therefore it must be ignored.

Well, Happily Ever After is just exactly such a thing! 

Nobody has ever been able to nail the CAUSE for which the inevitable and repeatable, achievable by anyone EFFECT is Happiness, nevermind Ever After-ness!

Finding and marrying a Soul Mate is not a project one can embark upon by reading the textbook and performing the required actions.

So Marion came up with a catch-all term to lump together the entire non-scientific (not anti-scientific!!!) world of actions and events. 

She called the psychic and spiritual world "the non-causitive sciences."

As has been observed in Astrology for thousands of years before "science" was invented, very often the EFFECT can precede the CAUSE.

That is, what happens as a result of an action can happen before the action is taken. 

In modern science, this can be accounted for if you have been following developments at the edges of theoretical physics where the realm of magic is converging on the realm of science.  But we've still a long way to go.

So how does this apply to L. J. Smith?  I have no idea because I don't know L. J. Smith personally.  But the Vampire Diaries fans are resonating to her Voice which has to be inflected by her deepest philosophical notions, possibly notions she isn't even aware she has.  I keep finding such notions lurking inside myself, a constant revelation, so I assume others have them too.

So how is it that one writer can observe in himself and his compatriots in Hollywood that taking a job (writing a script) that is just for the paycheck can cause a deterioration in quality and marketability of the byline when another writer (in novels at the time) finds the exact opposite, that taking whatever COMES TO HAND increases skill quality and marketability?

I have a theory (well, 2 actually )about how that could be.  It might not be true, and might not apply to any of the writers mentioned here -- but it would surely make a grand foundation for a novel series.

There is a principle of Magic that says that if a Magician turns his/her Talent to lesser tasks than the Talent was gifted to him for, then the Talent will dissipate, not be renewed by the Higher Power that gifted him with it.

That could be what the screenwriter was observing. 

But there's another way to look at this process.

In Magic, there is a principle known as the Law of Abundance.

It's pretty well illustrated by the Biblical story of Mana -- how in the desert, when the Tribes camped, in the morning the ground would be covered in a dew-like substance that could be picked up and taken home to eat.  When eaten it would taste like whatever the person craved, and sustain them perfectly in energy and vitamins.

From that story is derived the concept that we work for this Higher Power, God Himself.  God pays our salaries, not the person who signs the check.

We are gifted with a Talent to make our way in the world, and a Lesson that we must learn and take out of the world with us when we die.  What work we are assigned is the work needed to learn that Lesson, and our Salary will come to us via another channel. 

In other words wealth itself is mana, or a Gift. 

In yet other words, your salary is not caused by your work.

Salary, sustenance, income, wealth are not part of the Scientific Universe. 

Work, tasks, difficulties, traumas, job, unemployment, success and failure, are not causes that directly result in wealth or poverty.

So, if you live in a world where there exists such a thing (right alongside Science and interacting with it smoothly and invisibly) as the non-causative sciences, then you accept whatever tasks, work, job, script contract that comes to you, and you do that work with all your might, all your strength, every last iota of Talent, ability, craft, and no-stone-unturned meticulous effort.

If you work with that attitude -- that the task is yours because God assigned it to you -- then you will, little by little, achieve the purpose of your life.

Meanwhile, sustenance will be provided, sometimes wealth, but inevitably happiness will accrue (even in poverty!). 

But wealth and happiness (two often incompatible things unless your Soul has achieved its lessons in this life) have to be understood not as a result of  what you do but of what you are, what you've made of yourself on a Soul level.  And it isn't a simple, scientifically understandable paradigm. 

The laws of cause and effect as they operate in material reality (Pentacles of the Tarot) do not apply at the level of Cups or Wands -- at least not exactly and without modification.

If you live in a science-only world, where no spiritual dimension exists or functions, then you have to believe that if you take on a shitty job writing some crap script for a very small paycheck, then you, yourself have caused your reputation to deteriorate so you can't get more work BECAUSE you made a wrong decision about what work to accept.

If you believe that your actions and your actions alone cause you to get work, then you must believe that your actions cause you to not-get work.

The belief that there is nothing but simple cause/effect operating in the world can become your religion, and anything that challenges that belief (such as an inevitable Happily Ever After) must be rejected with religious fervor.

If on the other hand you can understand your reality as managed by and even driven by a Higher Power, then you will look at your monetary problem in another way. 

You might conclude that you were given wealth beyond your spiritual level of development to handle (e.g. that you didn't give the 10% to Charity you should have) and so find yourself in poverty.  You will then pray, make ammends, pray real hard, and take whatever work comes along and do it with all your Talent and all your might.

This is what happens when people find themselves out of work and, despite pounding the pavement, can't find any opening.  So they go volunteer at a Hospital as a candy striper or at a Soup Kitchen or Homeless Shelter -- or teach Bible Study on Sundays, or whatever -- just DO something for others.

And then a break happens, out of nowhere for no reason anyone can see, and the person's life picks up, barreling hell bent for leather toward a Happily Ever After.

That's the stuff out of which stories are made because that's how real life really works.  (I know real people who've been through that process and I've followed the astrology of it all.)

So if you find yourself young, with writing Talent or storytelling Talent, you can regard that Talent as a "lethal weapon" with which to "wipe out the competition" and achieve Great Things (and maybe die of a drug overdose in some posh, or foreign, Hotel Room). 

After all, "you" are just a lump of meat, and it's a dog-eat-dog world.  You're never going to be Happy Ever After because there is no such thing -- there can't be because there's no such thing as a soul.  After all, brain research can account for every human trait and experience, including near-death and out-of-body so that proves there is no God.  What you, yourself do with your own hands is the only cause of events in your life.  So use your Talent to elbow your way to the top of the heap -- at least you can breathe a little up there.

OR -- you can look at the entire matter from different perspectives, not just that one narrow "Scientific" perspective.

Why did I put scientific in quotes?  Because real science keeps an open mind.  No matter how well proven any theory might be, it is always possible that NEW EVIDENCE can prove that theory wrong.  Science doesn't "believe" -- science only knows, and that knowledge is only tentative.

The Real Scientist admits of the possibility of the non-causal sciences -- even if she hasn't seen any evidence at all of such a thing.

It's possible to think it, so it might be true.  It might not be likely, and you might not want to bet your life on it -- but...

See?

So now read the following from my review column -- The False Hobson's Choice:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/columns/0212.html

That's part of a Series on Justice, and you'll find the index to the year 2012 reviews here:

http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2012/

That's my review column I've been writing for the paper magazine, The Monthly Aspectarian which is posted to their website lightworks.com then after the exclusive they paid me for has run out, it is archived on my site, http://simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/   

Science and Magic are not different things, not incompatible.  They are different coordinate systems, each useful for describing the same Universe.

A coordinate system is like a Point of View.  When writing a novel, you can shift the genre (remember the post on genre I linked here above) by shifting the point of view.

And that brings us back to the top of this topic.  A writer's LIFESTYLE "informs" the writer's "Voice" -- but Voice and Lifestyle are not connected by Cause/Effect -- they are interlaced via the non-causative sciences view of the universe. 

Some Voices irritate, send shudders through you.  Others soothe.  Others are as @MiriamSPia noted, boring. 

Boredom is, as most students of Magic know, the strongest of all Wards.

You want to keep something secret?  Make it boring. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com  
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

Believing In Happily Ever After Part 6 - The Writer's Lifestyle and Happily Ever After

Part 5 of this series is:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html

On this blog, I talk a lot about the business model of being a professional writer, about writing craftsmanship, and I talk a lot about the Romance story requirement of the Happily Ever After ending.

I talk a lot on this blog about fiction, fictional worldbuilding, and crafting a good story.

But let's take a moment to look at how a writer crafts the story of their own life.

On Twitter in February 2012, I sat in on one of my favorite chats, #litchat, where the topic was about a lawsuit (that seems to have merit as it describes egregious wrongdoing, but that seems to me to hold hidden threats to writer's freedom to create and communicate).

Here's the URL to a brief description of the issue:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=146661802

So #litchat kicked around the issue of "truth in memoir writing" quite a bit, showing that many writers and readers have only begun to think about this topic, and consider it deeply.

In this particular case it seems a memoir writer fabricated actions and events that never occurred - on purpose - just to popularize the book and allegedly donate money to a charity -- which may never have occurred.

The facts of the case seemed to capture more attention than the legal principle I find alarming -- that a court can decide what is or is not factual in a memoir -- (not autobiography, not biography, but memoir). 

Since I'm in the midst of writing a memoir this intrusion of law into subjectivity gives me a different perspective.  Call a spade a spade, I was freaked out by this lawsuit article!

The next day I ran into a post -- I think it was on google+ -- on a blog by a teenager who wants to become a writer (and likes the kind of stuff I like) who was just as freaked out by a discovery on literary contract law that I've known about since I was younger than she is. 

The post was about L. J. Smith (author of Vampire Diaries) losing control of her product, and her byline, and all her titles, having the publisher hire writers to write more stories in her universe under her byline.

That sort of thing has been "business as usual" in publishing, especially YA, longer than I've been alive, so ho-hum-yawn for me but a major freaking-out-discovery for this young writer-to-be. 

When I learned about this standard practice in publishing, I already had decided I wanted to be a writer (not that I would, but that I wanted to) but was only mildly curious that some of my favorite novel series (Nancy Drew for example) were written by a lot of different writers under the same byline.  I just wondered how they managed that miracle and wanted to be part of it. 

Here's the post by this very talented teen writer:

http://parafantasy.blogspot.com/2012/02/this-is-utterly-ridiculousi-cant-even.html

Now, keep in mind the memoir writer who "sold out" for money, the idealistic teenager getting a taste of real life as a writer -- considering the biggest thing in writing news these years is Harry Potter, and the writer writing all her own story and benefiting from it all, she has a reason to believe writers keep what they earn -- and put this together with how L. J. Smith is being hammered for being successful.

Think about Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and her legal battle to keep hold of her St. Germain as a Vampire concept.  (she won, but just barely, and only after years of court battles during which she had to switch to writing about Olivia and other female vampires who were "made" by St. Germain.)

When I learned about multiple YA authors writing a series under a joint byline with the worldbuilding and byline being created by publishers, I also learned that Films and TV drama were written the same way, though authors would get byline credit. 

I later learned that byline credit could be extremely fictitious, too!  But since I wanted to 'be a writer' I was merely interested in how they managed all that and still got paid.  (I now know that sometimes they don't get paid!  Getting paid is a different issue!) 

I do hope you've been following the blog by one of my favorite Hollywood writers who "tells it like it is" in Hollywood from a writer's point of view:

Here's an example:
http://allan-cole.blogspot.com/2012/02/follow-bouncing-beach-ball-part-two-and.html 

Yes, this is "The" Allan Cole!!! 

Here's the masthead of his blog:
---------
Tales sometimes tall, but always true, of Allan Cole's years in Hollywood with his late partner, Chris Bunch. How a naked lady almost became our first agent. How we survived Galactica 1980, with only the loss of half our brain cells. How Bunch & Cole became the ultimate fix-it boys. How an alleged Mafia don was very, very good to us. The guy who cornered the market on movie rocks. Why they don't make million dollar movies. And many more.
-------------

Now, with all this background in mind, I run into the following post on a blog that usually has very interesting, salient, and informative entries:

http://gointothestory.blcklst.com/2012/02/screenwriting-101-jonathan-lemkin.html

Here's the blog entry that caught my attention this time, just a quote in isolation from the context (which I am familiar with but don't think much about):

-----------------
THE SCREENWRITING BLOG OF THE BLACK LIST
Screenwriting 101: Jonathan Lemkin
Posted on February 14, 2012 by Scott

“If you let your lifestyle expend your last check, you then say yes to a really bad project to keep the checks coming. The quality of your work goes down, your reputation goes down, and it’s harder to get the next job. I’ve definitely taken the wrong job a couple of times, and it’s very hard to do your best work if you’re feeling like, ‘Oh, this is the wrong job.’”

– Jonathan Lemkin (Lethal Weapon 4), excerpted from “Tales from the Script”
--------------------

OK, now back to the main subject I blog about here, how to raise the reputation of ROMANCE GENRE - but in particular science fiction Romance, Paranormal Romance being a real focus (since I write vampires in love).

One of my followers on twitter @MiriamSPia (a writer, surprise-surprise!) commented on a guest post I did for another beginning writer who had asked on yet another blog post about the challenges of cold-pitching a project at an agent or editor at a convention (being SF fans, they are planning on being at the Worldcon in Chicago 2012 -- worldcon.org for info).

The Guest post was for @Madison_Woods and it's in two parts.  Here's the first part which discusses the origin of Genre showing how a new writer can use a particular understanding of genre to create a pitch that will sell.

http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/genre-tuesday-guest-post-from-jaqueline-lichtenberg-part-1/

It went up on Valentine's Day, at the same moment as the following post which I did for Alien Romances:

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html 

which discusses the TV Series ONCE UPON A TIME.

Miriam commented on twitter:
I think its that "happily ever after" may seem boring and peaceful to outsiders.

As I've established in my posts here about Happily Ever After -- and the other posts linked in those posts mostly about how a writer uses THEME to do "worldbuilding,"  my best analysis is that the ability to suspend disbelief and enter a world ( remember "liminal" from the Genre Guest post) where there is a genuine threat that a situation will finally resolve with a Happily Ever After Ending (yes, threat! - to some people happiness is more threat than reward) depends entirely on the ability to include GOD in your model of the universe.

That doesn't mean you have to be "religious" or "spiritual" or anything like that.

It simply means you need to be able to STIPULATE that maybe there could be such an extra-reality entity orchestrating events, creating souls.  Some people can't stipulate that premise -- it's just way to scary.  So they can't cross that "liminal" threshold that the Guest Poster prior to my Guest Post talked about in such scholarly terms. 

Here's the guest post about "liminal" experience:
http://madisonwoods.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/genre-tuesday-with-dr-harrison-solow/ 

To accept the idea that there is HAPPINESS in finding a SOUL MATE -- you need to accept the idea of SOUL, which means humans aren't just meat.  There's something else to us.

What that is, where it came from and how it works can be open questions, but they have to be questions somewhere in the reader's psyche.

Now, for those who have followed my posts here on Tarot and Astrology, you know that I've used these esoteric tools to show you how to do the worldbuilding (hopefully invisible to the reader) that supports the foundations of story upon which you can build a plausible relationship that hurtles toward an "inevitable" Happily Ever After resolution of the main conflict.

Here are index posts to those posts in case you missed them:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/04/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html

The sense of "hurtling" and the sense of "inevitability" of the Happily Ever After ending do come from using tools in those index posts, yes, but they also come from the way the writer herself lives her personal life, and her professional life.  Or maybe it's vice-verso -- that you live a certain way because you understand such tools.

As I pointed out, these aren't the only philosophical tools around that produce this effect.  Choose your own tools, but master them to the point where they are fully integrated not just into your novels but into your life.

Examine what this teenager writer-to-be has said, (and what the comments on that post add up to) about how precious L. J. Smith's "touch" on this Vampire Diaries material is.

Think about the severe shift in the "feel" of the Darkover novels after Marion Zimmer Bradley was no longer writing them -- that transition is less jarring because the turnover to her successor was gradual as she became too ill to do the actual work.

What exactly is that quality that we treasure so much in the VIBRATION that a particular writer injects into material?  We often term that the writer's "voice" and it's terribly illusive for new writers to get a handle on.

The truth is you can't hear your own voice the way others hear it (not even in recordings, and not when reading words you have written).

One vital ingredient in a writer's "voice" is how they live their lives, professionally and personally.

Look again at that quote from the screenwriting blog. 

If you take "the wrong job" just because you've let your lifestyle drive you into needing a check, you will find the quality of your work deteriorating and it'll be harder to get another job (by this, the screenwriter is talking about WORK FOR HIRE -the exact business model that is freaking out L. J. Smith's fans.)

Here's something I know about Marion Zimmer Bradley.  She did take just anything that came along, writing, editing, odd jobs, anything!  She had kids to feed and bills to pay and she scrambled and scraped for years before the career triumph of having one of her novels made into a TV miniseries.

If you've read the Darkover novels in publishing order, you know that the quality of her work increased over the years.

But she did what that screenwriter is advising writers not to do.

What's the difference? 

We'll look carefully at that difference next week in Part 7 of Believing In Happily Ever After.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

You can find my January 2012 release THE FARRIS CHANNEL and 11 other books in that series (some by Jean Lorrah), plus my other novels, 3 with audiobook versions at
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

Genre: The Root Of All Decisions

Last week I responded to the confusion one reader of these posts who is also a writer expressed.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/06/genre-root-of-all-confusion.html
In the course of that post I said:

------
That's right - genre shapes the world of entertainment so that what you may may have access to, or may discover first, depends entirely on what others want rather than on what you want (or really need).  So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.  
------

This situation (which is changing so fast it's confusing) has profound consequences for writers, readers, and probably human civilization.

Marketing is based these days on some mathematical principles I discussed in a previous post here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html

One principle of marketing I didn't discuss in any depth is information overload.

Way back in the 1970's Alvin Toffler (a journalist) wrote a book titled FUTURE SHOCK, which I urge you to acquire and read.  It's had many printings and you should be able to find it easily.

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Shock-Toffler-Summary-ebook/dp/B004XQVJB6/rereadablebooksr/ 

That is a link to a "study guide" to Future Shock -- on Kindle.  That book is so important it's still being studied, and I think younger people probably need the "guide" because many of the then-contemporary references are now obscure after only 40 years.

In this book, Toffler pointed out to the general reading public something that only SF writers and readers, and some scientists, were discussing.

Remember the World Wide Web only began in 1990 with the creation of HTTP, hypertext, the code for web pages.

In the 1980's, there were Lists and Bulletin Boards proliferated, but only a few neighborhoods had dial-up services that allowed you to get your computer to read these Boards.  Every Christmas, the access to the Boards would clog up and become impossible as the number of people with a modem increased 10-fold or more via gifts.

Through the 1990's fiber optic cables were laid at a frantic pace, all based on a lie deliberately told by a corporation head -- about the rate of increase of the amount of information being transmitted on "the web."

The lie led to the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000's.

Now, in 2011, we're seeing "slowdowns" again as data transmission maxes out what fiber was laid and lit.  (also as corps fight government for control of traffic patterns and volumes)

All of this was foreseeable by Toffler in the 1970's.

The core of the issue, for Romance readers and writers anyway, has two nuclei.

A) The basic hardwired LIMIT of the human brain & emotions for decision making

B) The available strategies that attract the most people trying to deal with those hardwired limits being exceeded

Marketers (who invented genre and continually re-define it) know what neuroscientists discovered around the time Toffler was writing.

The human brain's wiring allows a human to make a certain number of decisions during a wake-period (i.e. per day).

Then you have to sleep. 

Confusion sets in as that limit is reached.

Modern living (cell phones, texting, web-surfing via phone, at work, etc) has an increased number of decisions per day built into the infrastructure.

Agricultural living centuries ago didn't require any such pace of decision making, except maybe when being over-run by invaders.

And then there would be a few days of stark terror, followed by bare survival, followed by resuming the slow pace.

Google saw the opportunity in the information overload situation and has made good sorting information out, and sorting real information from noise (i.e. spam).

But now even Google brings up thousands of pages on almost any search terms.  How do you sort the sort?

Also CNN made good by deploying camera/news crews all over the world, making them satellite broadcast capable, carrying their own batteries, able to report on anything anywhere at any time.  That opened a flood of information sources that was simply overwhelming, in spite of very professional editing.

See my blogs on what is an editor.  This one has a list of the previous ones in the series:

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

The CNN you see today does not in any way resemble the CNN that dominated cable news for a decade.

There's more reason for that than merely political slant.

The reason, (from an SF writer/ futurologist point of view) is rooted in item B) above -- available strategies that attract people.

The influx of sheer information is causing a whole generation that is now in their 40's to fight back by ignoring information such as CNN specialized in providing.

In the 1990's, information (live visuals from around the world) was a novelty, and the events seemed "important" simply because we never would have known had CNN not had a crew on the spot.

20 years later, world events don't seem so important.  They are on every TV channel -- hundreds of channels that didn't exist in 1990 -- and on the Web newsfeeds (which didn't exist then) -- and now in newspapers delivered to your iPad or Kindle.

What is common, what floods in with force and abundance, becomes "cheap" and therefore uninteresting.

But it's uninteresting for another reason.  The human brain can accept just so much information in one day, and that's it. 

As the limit is reached, each successive incoming item is less interesting.  The nervous system can't respond to being jerked around like that (yes, this is relevant to Romance novels - very relevant).

Bombarded and stressed to actual, inherent, hardwired physical limits, people fight back by ignoring.

All of this flood of information has been added on top of what we are hardwired to prioritize -- child-care, getting money, food, shelter, and paying attention to those intimate individuals inside our lives more than the faceless strangers outside our lives.

So TV news has become soap opera, a hard-news story such as the tornados in the central USA in April/May gives a few facts then cuts away to quotes from victims giving personal "color" to the story, making it a story rather than an information dump.

Those who want to make headlines (politicians, ax grinders) start squabbles and sling insults at each other.  So-and-so said such-and-such about whoever.  Whoever answered by trashing So-and-so.

Since when is name-calling news?

And what has that to do with Romance?

Oh, it has everything to do with Romance. 

Readers of novels seek out a novel to GET AWAY FROM the information dump, the stress of being required to learn stuff (yes, neuroscientists have measured the number of things a human brain can learn between sleeps, too, and it's a hardwired limit)

But what is the process of "seeking out a novel" these days?

Well, that process has changed markedly, and will change even more.

But here's one clue quantified by marketers.

As with the fight to be at the top of Google's search results page for your keyword, the fight for your attention pervades e-space.

Marketers have discovered that most people (probably not you, if you're over 40 and an SF reader) will CHOOSE FROM the first 3 to 5 items they come across.

A purchase will be made if there are 3 or 4 choices.  If there are more than 5 choices offered, the customer will more likely wander off into confusion, unable to MAKE A DECISION.

There you are, 10 novels almost identical (all labeled Romance) -- choose one.  Most people won't choose.

There you are facing 3 Romance novels.  Pick.  Flip-flip, oh, that's interesting, CLICK BUY NOW.

People act decisively when there are fewer things to compare.

That's hardwired into the basic human brain, and remember the fog of confusion that sets in when an individual is reaching a decision-limit for the day.

These days, with all the influx of information, the demand for decisions, the need to learn new procedures for doing things you always used to do without thinking -- (I have to discuss my adventures with my new iPod as a Kindle reader, but that's another topic, yet intimately related) -- each and every one of us is walking around maxed out by noon every day.

Yeah, by noon or halfway through your day whenever you started, you've pretty much learned as many things as you can for the day, made as many decisions as you can, and the "fog" begins to set in.  By 3PM or the equivalent for you, forget it.

Now, I've been reading a whole lot of urban fantasy with contemporary settings, lots of fantasy (a few really good SF novels I have to talk about in my review column), and just lots of fiction.

I can't even scratch the surface.  There are more books than ever on my to-read stack, and I can't DECIDE to discard unread ones!!!  Too many decisions. What if I miss something important.

Yet no way can I read it all.

So I can't say my cross-section analysis is as good as it has ever been.  I know I'm missing out on some things.

But -- I think I've found something that may exemplify a trend.

We all know the social analysts have compiled statistics on the changes sexual mores in the USA, maybe the world.  These trends among readers show up in what editors demand of writers -- the way they promulgate a formula for a Romance line.  That is, so many sex scenes of such and so length, such and so amount of graphic language, and various situations that must be there and others that must not.

Westerns used to have some of that kind of formula behind them, but that formulaic approach is one reason the Romance Genre as a whole does not acquire more respect. 

But it's also one of the reasons Romance sells so much better than most other genres.

After the relentless pounding our nerves take in a day, when we're totally maxed out on learning and deciding, we want to read something that's predictable while fresh and new, and that soothes the nerves rather than challenges.

So what's the trend?

With Romance genre reading as a background, readers are venturing into other sub-genres such as Fantasy-Romance or SF-Romance, or Paranormal Romance (all of which I devour ravenously).

And what I'm seeing in the way writers are crafting the romance branch of the plot parallels what we see in everyday life, the way people conduct their "real" lives.

The trend I want to point out here is one about how writers depict Relationships forming in a Romance.

It must be 20 years now since the moral standard emerged that says serial monogamy is not "sleeping around." 

The standard has become to test drive a boyfriend before getting really serious.

Triangle Situation Romances are bleeding into SF and Paranormal sub-genres with these assumptions firmly in place. 

And of course the plot revolves around the woman making a choice between boyfriends.

Do you see where I'm going?

Information.

Test drive your guys until you find "the right one" -- the one who delivers the best sex, or the best sense of self-worth, or security, or sense of danger, or whatever you're looking for or need in a guy.

But our exterior, non-relationship, world floods us with more information than we can tolerate, and our defense is to ignore most and depend entirely on "editors" to select what we really need to know and present it in 90-second bytes called "news."

We have to ignore even those 90-second news items in order to have the capacity to evaluate all the information gathered on test-driven guys.

We test-drive so many guys, collect so much information about all of them, we end up not deciding. 

I think the buy-decision research that shows offering a customer too many choices results in the customer wandering off without making a purchase explains the plethora of "ex's" littering so many people's lives.

The "arranged marriage" allows you only one choice.

"Playing the field" drowns you in too much information, resulting in no-decision.

Marrying your High School sweetheart or the boy-next-door may soon come back into fashion, simply because the number of choices are fewer and therefore a decision is made.

Now, what if misery results from a bad choice made too young in life?

That brings us back to what I said at the top here:

-----
So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else.  
-----

"Learn to be satisfied with what others want" -- in choosing a guy, that means succumbing to the social pressure to be married and have kids (or adopt).  You then have to make do with the husband you have, somehow making your peace with the flaws.

Perhaps the Romance genre will revive the scene of the neighborhood kaffee klatches where the mothers sit around minding the kids and bitching about their husbands -- learning thereby that everyone has something to bitch about and that's what binds us together.

In the 1970's, women's lib became the "what others want" that you had to be satisfied with, as it became the norm for married women to work for a living.

In the 1950's, prevailing opinion among working men was that a man ought to be paid more than a woman because a man had a family to support.  If the man wasn't paid more for his work, his wife would have to work, and if she did that his children would not grow up to be happy, well adjusted human beings.

I kid thee not!!!  That was indeed the rationale.

Today I don't know many families where both spouses don't have careers.  These are people raising kids who were raised by two working parents.

OK, today many households have one or the other spouse out of work.  Let's hope that's really temporary! 

SFR premise though - suppose the current hard-recession, double-dip recession or mini-depression the USA is in leads to working spouses being paid double and the other spouse staying home to care for kids?

It might put daycare centers out of work, or shorten school hours depending on non-working parent to do the rest of the schooling.

That could reshape society again. 

Since the real problem shaking the roots of our society is the Information Explosion Alvin Toffler discussed, sheltering one parent (doesn't matter which gender) from the pounding the workplace inflicts could produce the kind of excess decision-making-capacity in that non-working parent that is necessary to have patience with kids.

Now, what would that generation of kids grow up to be like?  More like the adults of the 1980's, pre-web?

Do you suppose Road Rage is the result of Information Overload?

I saw a series of clips from YouTube focusing on fistfights, hair-pulling catfights, and one really horrid shooting the other day. 

In most cases where images of violence between people having an argument over something petty have made it to the top of YouTube, the scene shows many other people just standing around.  No help offered.  No attempt to quell the hitting or bullying.  No interference.  NO DECISION.

We see the general public (via YouTube and handy phone-video) having turned indecisive if not indifferent or ignoring of new information such as "somebody might be hurt."

I can't believe this is because a majority of people just don't care about other people.  I can't believe this is because violence against strangers or even family members in public is approved of. Yes, some of these videos might be staged, but why would anyone watch videos of people ignoring a fight in a public place?  It's amusing because it illustrates how the viewer feels inside.  Apathetic, foggy, due to information overload.

We're just maxed out on decision making all day every day, just as Toffler discussed. 

Being maxed-out is affecting the way we choose a spouse, the way we raise our kids (letting the over-indulge in video games; using the TV as babysitter), and the way we interact with strangers in public (not getting involved because that could lead to even more decisions to make.)

And it affects how marketers market books at us -- limit choices in order to get a sale.

Take the marketer's thinking into account when you decide what genre to write in -- or to mix-n-match, or to invent a totally new genre and hope for your book to become a "market maker" like Harry Potter. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg Unlimited
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Genre: The Root Of All Confusion

A while ago I did a post titled Genre: The Root Of All Evil.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/genre-root-of-all-evil.html

Since then the issue of defining genre has come up on many twitter chats, for example on #bookchat which is about marketing, and #scifichat which ranges all over the "fantastic" -- and where even the very erudite experts have a hard time classifying a work.

Recently, a comment emerged addressed to me via goodreads.com
 in response to another blog post I did here on aliendjinnromances
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html
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MIRIAM wrote: JL, this is where I most recently 'caught up with you'. Usually I see you on Twitter and its been a while. I was humbled into submission about the SWFA membership pieces and am still baffled by the genre difference - lol, is that like gender difference?, between my first and second novels. The 2nd isn't even SF, but still feels like it 'should be' because 'I am' or something irrational but mysteriously truthful like that.
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Here's my reply substantially embroidered from what I wrote Miriam.

"Genre" is an invention mostly I think of "marketers" trying to figure out how to "account for taste" so that if you like one novel, they can then supply you an endless chain of novels "just like that only different."

Here are a couple of my blog entries on accounting for taste:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-ii.html  

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html
And on "the same but different" (a Hollywood term)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-8-beat.html
Astrology Part 8 is about "the beat sheet" and why it works commercially.

"Genre" is about selling (or marketing) professionally.

Art is totally different.

Art is about saying what you were born to say to the people you were born to talk to, to help, to scold, to enlighten, whatever.  Art is about your purpose in life while making money is about staying alive long enough to complete that purpose.

Since Genre is in fact an artificial construct, its borders and definitions are subject to whimsical change without notice as public taste, and "markets" (i.e. groups of people who like one thing, like Harry Potter fandom) shift and change, influenced by successful marketing of another product.

That's right - genre shapes the world of entertainment so that what you may may have access to, or may discover first, depends entirely on what others want rather than on what you want (or really need).  So you learn to be satisfied with what others want - and in a way that's "good" because it allows you to "fit in" and to discuss what others know about. In another way, though, it sows confusion within you about "who" you really are, what your purpose in life is, and how that relates you to everyone else. 

The Internet, (interweb and other terms), Web 2.0 and above required, is changing all that too fast for marketers to catch up. They are seriously confused. especially where "social networking" is involved.

See my recent entries on the value of social networking:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/social-networking-is-not-advertising.html  

And the following one posted May 3rd.  Note my blogs on writing come out on Tuesdays.  You may be able to sort them out by searching on Tuesday.

You will likely be successful now at mixing genres to make new ones, whereas in the past you would have failed -- because SF has bled into "mainstream" -- i.e. you see the motifs that originated in SF (like alternate universes) appear in general fiction meant for people who hate Science Fiction.

My personal theory about why people "hate" science fiction is that they were force-fed Ray Bradbury in High School under the label "science fiction" (but his stuff, while very literate, does not in any way shape or form resemble science fiction as I know it.)  Oddly, "Romance" has pretty much escaped that fate so far.

On Twitter, I made a writer-friend who does historicals who asked which of my SF novels she should try reading since she dislikes SF.  I pointed her to Molt Brother, and I don't know if she finished it but halfway through she liked it and intended to finish reading.  Molt Brother is an interstellar, human/alien relationship (not romance, but deep intimate involvement) where the driving force of the plot is an archeological mystery.

And likewise on Twitter, I made another writer-friend who is an SF fan but writes contemporary mystery (with a bit of fantasy mixed in) who eventually decided to try reading one of my novels - chose House of Zeor, the earliest published Sime~Gen novel and to her astonishment liked it and said she could see why it had spawned a fandom that writes fanfic in that universe.

You can find all of these (in ebook and print) by clicking the tabs in this Amazon "store" (you can then dig up the books on your favorite supplier's website.)

http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

This genre definition confusion issue is extremely relevant to the brand new Sime~Gen novel, FARRIS CHANNEL, which I'm now working to finish.

In this new novel, which tells the story of the founding of the House of Zeor, and is a sequel to FIRST CHANNEL and CHANNEL'S DESTINY, I wildly mix genres until you can't figure out which is what, which is kinda like "reality" you know.

I've got to write more, and at considerable length, in this blog about Sime~Gen, not just because Margaret Carter asked in her post here where she discussed Jean Lorrah's Sime~Gen novel TO KISS OR TO KILL (which is a genuine SF-Romance with sociological romance overtones), but also because as I was re-re-reading these novels to proof for the new publisher, and to prepare the new novels, I discovered that the principles of worldbuilding I've been discussing here are illustrated precisely in these novels.

Here's a link to Margaret Carter's post on Sime~Gen:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-sime-gen-books.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
NEW RELEASES
http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

What flavor am I?

In keeping with Murphy’s Law, I’ve had a very busy teaching schedule the past two months. This, of course, happening when I’m late on book deadline and creating lessons, printing handouts, driving to Hither and Yon In Florida for in-person workshops or sifting through dozens of emails for my on-line workshops are things that make me wish for thirty hour days. Hell, forty hours might not even be enough.
But be that as it may, when one does dang near back to back workshops with all levels of writers, one tends to—at times—come upon similarities in the questions students ask.

This season’s flavor seems to be students who want to write in [fill in the blank] genre and yet haven’t read the genre or—if they have—aren’t conversant enough to know where their manuscript would fit in.

Essentially, when a student catches me after class or via email and tells me about his or her work in progress, one of my first questions invariably is: What author(s) do you write like? What’s a read-alike list for your work?

And I’m invariably treated to a blank stare.

“My books aren’t like anyone else’s,” I’m told.

Oh. So you invented a new genre?

No, they haven’t. But the reality is they haven’t done their homework, either.
Is it important for a yet-to-be-published writer to know their read-alikes? Hell, yes. For one thing, it keeps you from reinventing a wheel that’s been around for a long time. (Hey, I wrote this great story about a guy named Romeo and a gal named Juliet and they’re in love but their families hate each other…Oh, it’s been written?) For another, it immensely helps you market yourself to an agent or a publisher.

“People who read Susan Grant, Colby Hodge, Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Susan Kearney, Rowena Cherry and Margaret Carter will love Linnea Sinclair’s books.”

Having that little fact in your query or on the tip of your tongue at a writer conference will indicate to the agent/editor that you’re a professional—even before you are. You’ve done your homework. You’ve researched the genre and the market. You know your audience. You know WHAT AUDIENCE YOU’RE WRITING FOR. You know you’re not wasting your time creating a story that’s already been done to death.

Yes, you are writing your own unique story but you know what shelf you belong on, what review column you’d be placed in, what kind of costume you’d wear if you had to represent your book at the next Romantic Times BOOKlover’s Conference masquerade party.

It also means you know the conventions (not as in conference but as in rules and regs) and tenets of the genre. Romance has to have an HEA. In fantasy/spec fic, magic must have a price. In a mystery there has to be, well, a mystery. A puzzle. It means you know the difference between hard science fiction, soft science fiction and space opera. And so on and so forth.

Does that mean if you’re Linnea Sinclair that you write EXACTLY like Sue Grant or Jacqueline Lichtenberg? Of course not. Each author is unique. But there are similarities. Think of it like ice cream: if you like chocolate ice cream, you more than likely will enjoy double fudge ripple or mocha java or brownie fudge ice cream. If you like cocoanut ice cream (my personal fave) you’d most likely enjoy a scoop of Pina Colada flavored ice cream.

You can make those kinds of decision at Baskin Robbins. Learn to make them as well at Barnes & Noble.

Hugs all and happy writing! ~ Linnea

www.linneasinclair.com