Science: Fact is funnier than Fiction

I'm always on the lookout for unusual, but plausible tricks to play on my heroes, although I balk equally at doing permanent damage, and at torments that result from stupidity.

Above all else, I require my SFR heroes and villains to be intelligent, effective and competent. Therefore, if my hero is going to suffer, it has to be a richly deserved come-uppance for his own arrogance, vanity, over-confidence, bad habits, or sexism. More often than not, I will strike him creatively below the belt, but my heroines… won't.

I love to start with a scientific fact, and weave it into an intelligent but humorous, character-driven Science-Fiction Romance plot. For instance, in googling "lightning" I was delighted to discover:

"Males are struck by lightning four times more than women."

Why is that? Scientists suggest this might be because males spend far more time in the great outdoors, swinging metal objects: swords, axes, hay forks, shotguns, rods (fishing rods), golfclubs… and thereby inviting disaster.

My own, more chaotic theory is that men bring Nature's wrath upon themselves owing to their size, physique, nature, and inclinations. They tend to whip out their whizzers and attempt to kill trees and offend dryads when Nature calls.

They do this standing up, creating a grounding arc of conductible matter, standing under trees (which is known to be ill-advised when a storm is brewing.) Ladies with a going problem on a golf course usually squat, if they cannot wait, which is considered a much safer attitude.

However… being of an inquiring mind, I proceeded to do a Boolean search  [men struck by lightning while urinating OR men electrocuted while urinating]. My search was highly satisfactory, not to confirm or refute my theory (which it didn't, at least on the first two pages), but because my search led me to some fascinating bits of esoterica.

The burning question (more specific than mine) Has a man been struck by lightning while urinating off a cliff ... went unanswered. I'm sure that was asking for too much information, anyway!

Apparently, a child "was struck by lightning while urinating on an electric cattle fence in rural Texas". And the same happened to a man in Montana. Then, there are men who mow the lawn during a storm, while listening to their ipods, and when struck, sue Apple.

Now, that's conduct unbecoming of a compellingly attractive Romance hero (or Romance villain.)

I came across several eminently sensible Navajo Taboos about appropriate behavior during thunderstorms, and also about poetic justice for those who are cruel to very small animals.

http://www.navajocentral.org/navajotaboos/taboos_nature.html

"Do not do a rain dance during a rainstorm because you will be struck by lightning."

In fact, I am working on a twist to this one for my next alien Djinn romance "Grand Fork". My heroine does the equivalent of a rain dance. The hero is struck.

"Do not urinate on an anthill because you will have trouble going to the bathroom."

If there were any truth to that, maybe as part of Health Care reform, patients might be required to wash away a few anthills before their treatment could be escalated to a prescription for Flowmax (or whatever it is called!)

PETA might object. So might the EPA…(please follow this link for news of the EPA granting a Presidential award to someone who came up with a way to stop animals urinating on trees!) Imagine! Perhaps you can see why my imagination has been described as Monty Pythonesque on more than one occasion. Science is such fun!

Even more to my taste is this site:

http://www.thenewz.com/weird-people.htm


WISCONSIN – "A man will spend 20 days in jail for urinating on an ATM machine. Apparently [the gentleman] became frustrated when the machine wouldn't give him any money and proceeded to pee all over the machine. Unfortunately, for [the gentleman], a security camera recorded the whole thing...."

He was lucky. A skinny dipper in New York State came away with less than a whole "thing" when

"… a giant snapping turtle used part of [the gentleman's] anatomy as a meal. [The victim] later stated, "I felt this excruciating pain in my groin and when I got my bearings, I realized a turtle had bitten my testicles and swam away with them…."


Naturally, I cannot introduce a successful snapping turtle into a Romance novel, because his happiness would tend to interfere with the traditional Happy-Ever-After of a Romance, which ought to involve marriage and the prospect of children.

However, there was a dangling bait element in Insufficient Mating Material (my second alien romance novel in the god-Princes of Tigron series).

I'd been intrigued by Discovery Channel documentaries about candiru (a bloodthirsty little fish from the Amazon river) being attracted to urea and mistaking a man's equipment for the gills of its normal prey.

The true science inspired me to write the "a fish nibbled me" scene. Now, I don't approve of doing permanent harm to my heroes, so I might as well tell you that the teeny weeny willie fish was a plot device, dreamed up by the hero because he wanted the heroine to take a close look at his wedding tackle… He had a very good reason for that.

Djetth, hero of Insufficient Mating Material, faced a lot of challenges, including a broken jaw at the beginning of the book, and being marooned with the heroine on an island without running water or toiletries, and being hunted by a swat team of assassins. His story was immense fun to write, and although the book was categorized as a fantasy, there's a great deal of hard (well, sound) science in it.

Tarrant-Arragon led pretty much a charmed life, but he did experience an unpleasant moment, thanks to an alien version of the "Teddy Bear" cactus, which I learned about on a corporate team-building trip to Arizona. (I also discovered on that trip that I am a fantastic shot with a six-gun.)

The cactus's fruits have papery spines that are attracted to liquid, and it can kill a rabbit or any other animal by sinking deeper and deeper into the flesh. If you remove the spines and peel the cactus –which our guide did—it tastes a bit like kiwi, and is a very good source of Vitamin C. We were also told (after I'd been the group member who volunteered to sample it) that it was simultaneously a powerful aphrodisiac and laxative.

Since I cannot possibly leave you on a low note, I shall end with a scientific term for a phobia.

Keraunophobia : an abnormal fear of being struck by lightning.


I wish you all a very safe, happy, healthy, prosperous New Decade.

Rowena Cherry
Originally posted (with fewer scientific links and references) as part of a two-week-long contest (ending today, Sunday 3rd January) at http://lasrguest.blogspot.com/2009/12/guest-blog-rowena-cherry.html


(Visitors who leave comments on ALL posts have a chance to win a bundle of prizes)

AN OFFICER AND...

2010 is going to be the start of a rather busy on-line workshop year for me. I’m starting by co-teaching a workshop on building space/fantasy militaries with a beta-reader of mine, Michael L. Helfstein. USNR (retired). You can find a complete list on my website in NEWS . But I want to talk about—and, yes, promo a bit—the upcoming class on building militaries and military characters.

First, I have absolutely no military experience. That’s what Mikey’s for. But I am and have been a consumer of military stories, from romance to SF to action-adventure, from Weber to Brockmann to Dees, and more. I think that in order to write a good military character it takes both parts: a knowledge of the “world” you’re building, and a knowledge of reader expectations.

Thanks to my new nook, I received as a freebie download a copy of David Sherman’s and Dan Cragg’s first book in their STARFIST series—essentially, the Marine Corps in space. I’ve only read book #1—just downloaded book #2 this morning—but as an avid Suzanne Brockmann fan I related to the military descriptions and authenticity, but the plotting and, oy, head-hopping didn’t work for me. The characters did, eventually, enough that I ordered book #2 and likely will read more in the series because I definitely respect Sherman’s and Cragg’s street creds as former military. And if I was simply a purist SF reader and had never read more character-driven genres, I wouldn’t have felt cheated by the way the book was crafted. Or rather, my reader expectations would have been different and, likely, satisfied.

You see, it’s all about reader expectations and that’s something I don’t think we’ve touched on as much when we talk about world building here.

And it’s not just the romance angle, so please don’t bring that out as the only tune a female can dance to. My expectations have been met by Huff’s VALOR series, Moon’s VATTA’S WAR series, Weber’s HONOR HARRINGTON series. Not one is romance. I’ve also had fun reading David Drake’s LT LEARY series. Again, no romance, though definitely lighter in tone than STARFIST.

The difference between the books is the emphasis on character vs. world building. Not that Sherman and Cragg don’t have some memorable characters: Charlie Bass is a terrific hero. But I kept looking for a key central protagonist to latch on to and by book’s end, realized there really wasn’t one. There was Dean, there was Bass, there were other characters I thought might be central who then—yikes!—ended up getting killed off.

Surrounding all that was a lot of military structure, some neat tech stuff, and some interesting song lyrics. There were lots of words spent on the authors telling the reader about military structure and why the characters were doing or doing to do something or the other. There was, sadly to my way of thinking, far less showing the characters doing those things.

That perhaps can be chalked up to reader expectations. The ubiquitous (and I do believe this is changing) sixteen-year-old male SF reader is more attuned to reading manuals than fiction. Character development is dropped in favor of technical detail.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As long as that’s what your readership wants.

And that’s why I think reader expectations must be inexorably a part of whatever world building you do. But to do that, you need to know your readership; you need to know the likes and dislikes of the readers who would pick up your book.

Writing cross-genre, that’s not always an easy thing to suss out. I would love to have Sherman’s and Bragg’s knowledge to integrate into my books, mostly for the verisimilitude but also to draw in the wider range of readers. But I know I’d risk losing some readers as well. While I eagerly soaked up much of the military techs and specs and routines early in the first STARFIST book, I found by mid-book I wanted, now, more of the characters. I wanted to see them arguing about mission strategy rather than being told that certain strategy launched an argument, with emphasis being on mission details rather than on character action.

Sherman and Bragg had built the world for me. Now I wanted to see and feel the characters moving around in it (and yes, the ending chapters were ones where they did, and they were great fun!).

On the other side of the spectrum has been the charge that many futuristics and SFRs fail in their depiction and execution of technical and military details. “Sloppy science” is the criticism I’ve often seen, but also a failure in accuracy in military elements. While it can be maintained that the average romance reader doesn’t care about such things (and I do believe this too is changing), I think failure in those areas does weaken world building. When I read a romance set in Victorian England, I want to hear, feel, smell, and taste Victorian England. When I read a romance set on a military battleship in some distant galaxy, I want to hear, feel, smell, and taste life on board that battleship.

So my upcoming workshop in January with Lt. Commander Helfstein will strive to hit that middle ground. Mikey will provide the Sherman- and Bragg-like details. I’ll do my best to help students turn that detail into page-turning, character-based action.

And then I’ll reward myself by reading the second STARFIST book.
~Linnea

REBELS AND LOVERS, March 2010: Book 4 in the Dock Five Universe, from Bantam Books and Linnea Sinclair—www.linneasinclair.com

Kaidee hated when her ship didn’t work. Dead in space was not a place she liked to be. Especially with an unknown bogie on her tail, closing at a disturbingly fast rate of speed that made her heart pound in her chest and her throat go dry.


PS: Yes, I love my nook but then, I’ve long been an e-book fan and was previously reading on a small Dell Axim X50.

PPS: More info on the workshop HERE.

Settings, SFR, and Spiffyness

I've been absolutely thrilled to see the responses to The Galaxy Express' SFR Holiday Blitz. I've also been absolutely slammed with computer troubles and flu/cold/bronchitis, which is why you've not seen me here in a good while (all this befalling me, yes, after a triple-deadline). Bronchitis I'm rather used it--it's something that's plagued me (pun intended) since I've been in my twenties. More than twenty years ago. Computers invaded my life at about the same time (hmmm, wonder if there's a correlation?) but those troubles have become worse with age, while the bronchitis has rolled merrily along without much change.

I sometimes wonder if the computer troubles I face aren't yet more fodder for my plots and characters. As one reviewer said about my Finders Keepers:

[T]he vast majority of this novel is classic space opera, the sort of story in which rough-hewn pilots of either gender chug along space lanes in rickety old ships held together with duct tape, and sinister galactic empires plot against all and sundry for power. Not for Linnea Sinclair the spiffy, cutting edge man-machine futures of Ken MacLeod, Greg Egan or Charles Stross.

Maybe one of the reasons I don't do spiffy is that I've yet to meet a chunk of technology that permits me to experience spiffy. I have no faith that any universe--future or otherwise--with be trouble-free when it comes to technology. Okay, I'll 'fess up. I do have things break down on board the ships in my books because it ramps up the conflict. But I also have them break down because I'm fairly confident that's an event to which most of my readers can relate. (If you've never had a computer melt-down, please tell me where you live so I can move next door to you. Which means one of two things will then happen: either my computers will work flawlessly from that point, or yours will crash with gleeful regularity.)

This latest crash (maybe the motherboard--we're still not sure) resulted in a computer that refused to function under Windows XP but is chugging along nicely (so far) under Windows 7. I can't believe it's solely because Mr. Gates needed my $300 last week.

But I digress. I wanted to touch on settings in SFR because of a blog Heather from The Galaxy Express noted a week or so back, in which several readers commented on why they did--or didn't--read SFR. One poster noted that in reading the opening chapter of my Shades of Dark, she found technology was far too evident and took up much descriptive space.

Which, of course, made me sit back with my usual WTF? I wanted to post and ask her--I didn't, for a variety of reasons, two being bronchitis and limping computer--if she would have been equally as disconcerted by the description of the castle in a medieval romance, or the scent of leather and the snuffle of horses in a western romance? If she reads chick-lit, would an opening scene listing the character's designer shoes overflowing her closet bother her? If she reads mystery, would she prefer the details of the murder scene to be left out?

In SFR, the description of a ship's bridge or command consoles are my character's closet full of Gucci and Prada products, they are the flickering torches set into the rusty metal sconces angling out from the moss-covered stone wall.

Here's the opening paragraph from the prologue in Mary Jo Putney's Silk and Secrets:

Prologue
Autumn 1840

Night was falling rapidly, and a slim crescent moon hung low in the cloudless indigo sky. In the village the muezzin called the faithful to prayers, and the haunting notes twined with the tantalizing aroma of baking bread and the more acrid scent of smoke. It was a homey, peaceful scene such as the woman had observed countless times before, yet as she paused by the window, she experienced a curious moment of dislocation, an inability to accept the strange fate that had led her to this alien land.

Now, Putney is not only one lovely and classy lady, she's one helluva fabulous and well-known author. She writes--among other genres--historical romances. If she puts in the cloudless indigo sky, the tantalizing aroma of baking bread, and the acrid scent of smoke, it's because these details are not only important, they're expected.

Why, then, the problem with:

A stream of red data on a blue-tinged screen to my left snagged my attention. We were on the outer fringes of an Imperial GA-7's signal—a data relay drone normally not accessible to renegade ships like the Karn, and definitely not at this distance. But this was the Karn, Sully's ghost ship that routinely defied government regulations and just as routinely ignored ship's specs. So I slipped into the vacant seat at communications and executed the grab filter with an ease that even Sully would have been proud of.

Captain Chasidah Bergren. One-time pride of the Sixth Fleet and staunch defender of the Empire, illegally hacking into a GA-7 beacon.

Okay, maybe you've never seen a GA-7 beacon. But I've never seen a muezzin. So therein resides my rationale behind my usual WTF when I read comments that "SFR terms are too confusing."

As I've also often noted, I still haven't a clue in a bucket how to pronounce reticule. But it doesn't stop me from reading historicals and I don't ask the author to replace it with the word pocketbook.

Someone enlighten me as to why muzzein is acceptable and GA-7 beacon isn't. Please.

~Linnea

Linnea Sinclair
// Interstellar Adventure Infused with Romance//
Available Now from Bantam: Hope's Folly, Book 3 in the Dock Five Universe
Coming March 2010: Rebels and Lovers (Book 4)
http://www.linneasinclair.com/

Alien Romances Is Part Of The Galaxy Express's SFR Holiday Blitz

THOSE WHO WISH TO BE ENTERED IN THE SFR HOLIDAY BLITZ SHOULD ADD A COMMENT TO THIS POST.

See the sidebar for cover art of the prizes to be won in the SFR Holiday Blitz on this blog.

*****

The Galaxy Express streaked onto my radar with Heather's very first post on May 19th, 2008 which was titled "All Aboard -- We're Ready To Launch", had witty subheadings such as "It Takes A Village To Maintain A Lunar Outpost" and "A Wormhole By Any Other Name..." 

I did enjoy Heather's scholarly nod to "Romeo and Juliet"!

The Wormhole paragraph included a live link to this alien romances blog, which was very courteous and kind of Heather, and which resulted in a Google Alert.

I also rather enjoyed thinking about the village. Does anyone else remember a rock group called "The Global Village Trucking Company"?

Moreover, my favorite novel by Isaac Asimov is "The Gods Themselves" and one of the three parts involves a love story on a lunar outpost. What was yours?

How did you discover The Galaxy Express ?
Do you remember which of Heather's posts set fire to your imagination? If so, please tell the story in the comments here, below the official contest announcement which I quote:

The holiday season upon us, and that means 2010 is simmering just below the horizon. Start your New Year off right with a chance to score a free read in one of the hottest up and coming genres around—Science Fiction Romance!

Here’s the scoop: 12 bloggers have teamed up with 17 authors for your chance to win over 30 SFR books. Whether you’re new to the genre, or a fan looking to add to her collection, this event is for you.

Best of all, it’s dead simple to enter: There are no quizzes to answer, no hoops to jump.

For your chance to win all of the books listed in the sidebar by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Linnea Sinclair, Susan Sizemore, Margaret L Carter, Susan Kearney, and Rowena Cherry all you have to do is leave a comment for this post.

Print book prizes are limited to U.S. residents unless otherwise stated.

The deadline to enter is midnight on Friday, December 11, 2009. The winner will be announced on Saturday, December 12, 2009.

But don’t stop here! Increase your chances of winning even more books by visiting all of the participating blogs.

It’s easy:  Just click on one of the links to the participating bloggers below. Make sure to leave a comment on the post titled “SFR Holiday Blitz.” From there, you can then jump to the next blog. There’s a wide variety of books to win so why miss out?

Other blogs:

The Galaxy Express (which started the phenomenon, and could entertain you for hours!)
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net

Dirty Sexy Books

http://www.dirtysexybooks.com/Dirty_Sexy_Books/Home/Home.html

Ella Drake http://elladrake.blogspot.com 

Enduring Romance http://enduringromance.blogspot.com 

Flying Whale Productions http://maryfitz.typepad.com/my_weblog  

Lisa Paitz Spindler http://www.lisapaitzspindler.com/blog  

Love Romance Passion http://www.loveromancepassion.com  

SciFiGuy http://www.scifiguy.ca 

Spacefreighters Lounge http://spacefreighters.blogspot.com 

Take It To The Stars http://takeittothestars.blogspot.com 

Queen of the Frozen North http://www.cathypegau.blogspot.com 

You are here:
Alien Romances http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com 

Visitors can also see almost all the books that have been donated in the "Biggest Bang" "Listmania" on Amazon... We'd really appreciate some "Helpful" votes.

Moreover, if any science-fiction-romance lovers who are signed in to their Amazon accounts click through to the book pages to read the reviews, excerpts, and what-have-you, we'd very much appreciate it if readers would either check or write in tags such as "sfr" or "science fiction romance" to help other readers find great examples of this subgenre.

Thank you for your visit, your comments, and your support of SFR.

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 
on behalf of the alien romances authors

Science Fiction Romance and The Comedy Of Manners

Almost any plot or subgenre of literature can be reinvigorated as science fiction.

Westerns are a natural. You simply give black hats to some of your fellow Space-Ark-mates, or colonists and substitute aliens for the gentlemen in war bonnets.

Better still, make the alien equivalents of Native Americans the heroes. Or, make all of humankind walk in the shoes of all the aboriginal peoples our own colonists have wronged in the past, and present the incoming aliens as pilgrim fathers or conquistadors. Ah, but that isn't the stuff of Romance. Moreover, the natives win in "Independence Day".

You can have Quest plots (The Holy Grail in outer space... and very often, as with the Da Vinci Code, the holy grail in sfr is a fertile, pure young woman), Discovery plots, Adventure plots, Pursuit plots, Rescue plots, Mysteries (including murder mysteries), Rivalry plots, Revenge plots, Underdog plots, Transformation and/or Metamorphosis Plots, Beauty and the Beast, Coming Of Age, Who's Coming For Dinner (prejudice/forbidden love)....

The one plot that may not translate so well into an alien romance is The Comedy Of Manners... which in turn might be described as a highly entertaining, watered down Morality Play. (Erring protagonists don't die, they just end up married till death do them part.)

Yes, I watched "Sense And Sensibility" last night, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The cast included Emma Thompson, Tim Rickman, and a rather hunched Hugh Grant. I wonder how long it will be before Emma Thompson does us (us Romantics) a huge favor and makes movies of some of the Georgette Heyer novels.

The trouble with Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer --when it comes to space travel-- is that their plots and heroines don't kick butt. They are rewarded for not kicking butts, nuts, or giving tongue lashings to anyone. Heyer heroines, actually, are more dynamic. Some of them do have violent tempers, like Leonie, and they shoot men (or want very much to do so) and fight with swords, and cross dress (like Viola and a few other Shakespearean heroines), and drive racy vehicles too fast.

A Comedy Of Manners depends on the heroine wanting to marry a gentleman, but not being able to tell him so. She is too well-mannered, and he requires more encouragement than she offers.

Usually, she has a sister (possibly multiple sisters) who is/are man magnets, often for the wrong sort of man, and who behave like the sort of woman/women a chap would take as his mistress, but would never marry. Villainy in a man could mean that he has sex with a virtuous young woman (or tries to do so, or promises to do so within marriage) and then leaves her.

Imagine! James T Kirk would be the worst of villains in a Comedy Of Manners. The continent Spock would be the hero.... which he was for most of us, anyway.

In science fiction romance, our heroines have to be in greater physical danger than losing their reputations (ie being suspected of not being quite virginal). Unless they are Queens or Empresses married to a Henry VIII type, and likely to be subjected to a show trial and executed. But that is a different sort of plot. The archetypical Sir Jasper does not cut the mustard as a sfr villain. He'd have to want her world as well as her body.

Our heroines in futuristic settings are expected to be sexually liberated, to have smashed the glass ceiling, to hold their own and often their hero's (blaster or equivalent weapon). They have to rock. And multi-task. They cannot sit around, being nice and proper.

By rights, Eleanor ought to have ended up with Colonel Brandon. We saw much more of the Colonel. He was by far the most heroic. However, he did not want Eleanor. He was doggedly determined to love Marianne... and Marianne was the stock "silly girl" whom (in my opinion) we see far too often, setting themselves up as role models for our impressionable daughters in endless sit coms, Disney movies for teens, and high school dramas.

Eleanor got the man she wanted, but only because of the perfidy of Miss Steele. Colonel Brandon's patience was rewarded... but in sfr, does any hero or heroine worth his or her salt settle for being second best?

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Vampire Archetype Flashburned Into Memory

Before we start, look at the graph on this blog tracking the meteoric rise of Vampire Romance by number of titles per year over 10 years.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

I found this via the following post on Twitter which I retweeted (I don't know who Michele Hauf retweeted here):

RT @michelehauf: RT Track the meteoric rise of vampire romance over the past decade at VampChix! http://bit.ly/ycx0r

That's a shortened URL going to the whole blog - the long URL above goes directly to the specific post with the graph that tells it all.

And if you haven't investigated my Vampire Romances, take a look at http://www.simegen.com/writers/luren/ to sample free chapters and look at what other Romance writers have said (I can still post more comments if you have any you want linked back to your own website.)

OK, now that you've done your interesting homework, come to class, sit in your chair, fold your hands and prepare to be bored out of your mind with one of my insanely long posts -- which is worse this time because I have to brag or there's no way to make this point, and the point is really, really abstract and you probably don't want to know, and maybe it really ought to be kept a deep, dark secret.

--------Skip If You Know All About Archetypes-------

We've discussed archetypes before, and I've always assumed everyone knows what they are and how they work and why. But maybe not. If you know all about archetypes you can skip this section of this post and still understand the point. Look for the dashed-line divider below that says SKIP THIS SECTION IF. to see if you need to read that section.  That would be two whole sections of this monster that you can skip and still get the point.

The thing with archetypes is that they don't look like whatever manifestation you're seeing them inside of.

They don't seem "real" and have no absolute specifics about them. It takes some practice to walk the world and spot interacting archetypes in the people around you and their biographies.

People are so different, no two alike, and the differences matter to us. The similarities, not so much.

How can you say one person is "just another version" of another person?

But that's what successful Romance Writers (and other genre writers) do to make their characters (and dialogue) Flashburn into reader's Memory.

Some really successful writers don't even know (and shouldn't know) they're doing that at all.

Learning a little (very little) bit of Astrology can help sort the world around you into archetypes, but that's the lazy woman's way of learning it.

You can't make a diagram of an archetype (though that's what Tarot cards are and that works for some people). You can't do an animated gif to show what archetypes are. They aren't tangible or visible.

Archetypes are psychological patterns of non-manifested FORCE or ENERGY. They are templates for reality, not reality itself.

Yes, an archetype is a little like a web page template. It's not the template that matters to the page visitor, it's the color, sound, motion, words, videos, links, that make this page different from that page, and that is all that matters to a visitor, "what's here that's different from what's there."

But web designers know that what makes all the content accessible and high-impact on visitors (stopping surfers mid-click), conveying the meaning that is within the content is the underlying pattern, the design, the composition, the template.

Fictional characters are just like web pages in that sense.

If the template design shows through you get a stereotype. If the template design does not show through, you get a living, breathing, psyche-penetrating, communicating, real character who seems like a real person and "lives" in the reader's memory, dreams, and even manifests in their lives (yes, I have testimonials from my readers about how my characters have affected their real life decisions and results - to the good, thankfully!)

New writers need to learn to percieve this dual level of reality (template vs. content) because what matters to people is the specific manifestation of the archetype, not the archetype itself. "Happiness" is achieving a specific manifestation of whatever archetype is operating in life (and none of the other possibilities within the archetype), and nobody cares what the archetype is as long as the specific desired manifestation appears.

People and thus characters prefer to ignore the fact that an archetype encompasses their reality. It's irrelevant. They want what they want.

For example: In Astrology, Tarot and in Archetypes, there is no distinction between "winning" and "losing" -- between succeeding and living or failing and dying. These are polar opposites to us living beings, but irrelevant distinctions on the level of archetypes.

I'll leave you with that concept for a while because it's so nonsensical to our ordinary consciousness it takes a while to sink in. But it's the main clue you will need to understand a couple of future points I hope I can make on this blog.

Archetypes exist on the astral plane, or in Kabbalah Yesod represented by The Moon in astrology.

The best show-don't-tell I've ever seen for "the astral plane" was the Star Trek: The Original Series episode SHORE LEAVE (also written by Theodore Sturgeon, one of my favorite authors and I knew him well enough to know that he understood the astral plane well enough to have encoded it in this episode deliberately, though I don't know if he did.)

Here's a reminder about the episode on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shore_Leave_%28Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series%29

What you think, wish, dream, what just crosses your mind, what you subconsciously fear or want, becomes MANIFEST on the astral plane. Your psyche is the template, and energizes your personal reality. On the Astral Plane, anything you want (or fear or don't want) will surround you.

The Kabbalistic trick is to understand that the astral plane is the foundation of our actual concrete everyday reality. And our reality actually is influenced starkly by what we think, dream, feel, and subconsciously hold dear.

Archetypes are the pattern of illusion and delusion, and they're plastic.

In addition to your personal manifestations of archetypes in your own life, archetypes have attributes defined by the human Group Mind that downloads and pours content into them, content that is displayed on that Group Mind's homepage.

Maybe all archetypes are eternal and the same ones arise wherever humans are. The Magician. The Mage. The Vampire. The Maiden. The Mother. The Crone. The King. The Queen. The Youth. The Outsider. The Alienated Hero. The Warrior. The Shaman.

Which are you living inside? Living with? Playing publically?

You can recognize archetypes manifest in something you're familiar with. A badly handled archetype becomes a stereotype, just as a badly handled "foreshadowing" becomes "telegraphing."

Last week we discussed Sharon Green's WARRIOR WITHIN starring Terrilian.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html (which post is mis-named, it is Astrology part 7)

Remember what we discussed and think about The Female Warrior Archetype - Amazon? - Marion Zimmer Bradley's Renunciates?

Archetypes do change how they manifest over generations. Yet the more they change the more they stay the same. Still, the available options you may choose from in your life or your novels change with the Group Mind.

You can change your options list by changing what Group Mind you belong to. Think about how a person can change when they do something drastic in their life - such as a religious conversion, joining the Army, graduating and leaving the "old neighborhood" losing touch with all the kids from class and finding new friends among co-workers. Consider a Rock Star fan who moons&moans, then cuts loose and goes Groupie, following the star around the world, associating with the Star's friends and forgetting family. Same person: different manifestation.

Today the female image has shifted markedly from where it was in, say, the 1940's before women contributed to the USA winning World War II. Now some women have become (or been brainwashed into becoming) suicide bombers, and there are more acts of violence against women in TV fiction than ever before since anyone started counting violence on TV. But at the same time, women are combat trained and gaining combat stripes in the armed forces, rising to high rank where that was prohibited before.

Something is changing in our Group Mind, and that change is accelerating.

But that's all very theoretical and abstract. Worse, that quick reprise doesn't even scratch the surface of what we can see once we are able to sort the world around us out into archetype and manifestation. But seeing doesn't accomplish much.

What can we do with this concept of the archetype?

Can we make our Group Mind change its mind about Relationships, and thus consequently about the merit of the Romance Genre in general and all its variants in particular, and possibly even the entire notion of what constitutes "peace" in this world?

----SKIP THIS NEXT SECTION IF...--------

...blatant bragging offends you or if you're already familiar with the origin of the Sime~Gen Universe novels and all the Star Trek connections underlying them, and how this all spawned Vampire Romance.

You can happily skip this section, and still probably get the point anyway. Scroll down to the next line of dashes where it says POINT.

In the Bantam paperback STAR TREK LIVES! on which I was the primary author, we discussed the then popular theory that "Spock" was actually a new Archetype - The Alienated Hero but heroic because of Intelligence not Brawn. In retrospect, it's clear that Spock actually raised the prestige profile of the Geek, the outcast Class Brain. Spock was considered sexy! The Group Mind attitude toward the Geek, The Brain, the Egghead changed in much the way we would like to see the prestige profile of the Romance Genre raised.

It's unclear whether the Archetype illustrated by Spock caused the change, or emerged because of the change sparked by Star Trek -- possibly this Group Mind/ Archetype Manifestation process is as interactive as the manifestation of Violence on TV vs. Violence in Society. Think of bootstrapping, or climbing the inside of a rock chimney. It's not either/or. It's a little this, a little that, until change manifests.

Smart men weren't considered sexy in the 1960's, any more than smart women were attractive.

The book STAR TREK LIVES! (which was published in 1975, six years after my first SF story sale and a year after House of Zeor, my first novel) blew the lid on Star Trek fandom and brought in (via the Star Trek Welcommittee) hoards of new fan writers brim full of stories to tell.

Some of those new fan writers had grown up reading Romance and though they may have watched the same TV screen with the men in the room, these women saw a different Star Trek. They saw hot romance sizzling in the background and sub-text of every scene, and that is what they wrote about in fanzines.

They literally invented from scratch what has become the genre of SFR or Science Fiction Romance.

The first Inspirational Science Fiction Romance is posted for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/

And as published Relationship Driven HEA Trek, they lured many readers into the genre until it finally (after several sad failures) burst into the Romance genre scene with THE VAMPIRE ROMANCE.

Huh?

What has VAMPIRE ROMANCE to do with SFR? With Science Fiction?

Vampires are FANTASY. Paranormal. Aren't they?

Vampires are supernatural EVIL, so they have to be FANTASY right?
Vampires can't be Science Fiction?

Vampires are Horror. That's the vampire archetype. Right?

How many posts have I done on this blog explaining the paradigm and trope underlying genre fiction, and how a new writer breaks that trope at peril of life, limb, reputation and career?

Romance trope requires the couple find each other attractive (if not at first; eventually).  Real attraction often first manifests as repulsion, and that makes a good Romance, but ultimately it must transmute into an attraction the reader can relate to.

And how can anyone love something EVIL?

Evil isn't sexy.

Surely not?

Oh, our predecessors soooo lacked imagination!

Or did they?

When and where did SFR and romantic Vampires actually begin?

Margaret Carter, one of our staunch contributors on this blog is the expert on the history of Vampire literature, so I'll let her point you to the answers on that. It was actually longer ago than you might think.

Major classics of Great Literature aside, though, look again at that graph I pointed you to at the beginning of this post.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

It only goes back to 1997 which is ancient history for most readers of this blog. But I'm discussing the manifestations of the Vampire archetype in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's. That graph would not be parabolic had there not been 30 years of cultivating of the Group Mind's taste before 1997.

The Romance mass paperback publishers found there was a sudden market in a certain age group for Vampire Romance.

The Vampire did, however, turn off a lot of romance readers.

It disturbs people. Even today you say "I write Vampire stories" in a full room and listen telepathically and you'll hear "Evil" and all the religious people will leave the room or try to convert you.

OK, so the Romance publishers started putting VAMPIRE ROMANCE or something similar on the spines of those certain, slightly different, romances -- romances with a supernatural dimension, edgy romances flirting with the issue of Evil -- to warn off their more sensitive readers.

Meanwhile, in Science Fiction and the budding Fantasy field (yes, before STAR TREK fanfic, there really wasn't much of an adult Fantasy field - "adult" not meaning graphic sex scenes, but fantasy that was not aimed at 10 year olds) there was a flood of Vampire novels published.

Concurrent with the Science Fiction genre was the Horror Genre, often confused with SF, and most all the Vampire novels ended up labeled Horror even those with Good Vampire Heroes. That was when I started reading a lot of "Horror" even though I dislike the Horror genre. Non-Horror genre novels were published under the "Horror" label because nobody else would have them -- they contained a VAMPIRE!

A genre example.

Star Trek was the first real SF on TV. When it was cancelled after the first 3 years, and went into syndication so successfully, producers began to search for a way to lure the Star Trek audience to a new show.
They presented Star Trek fans with SPACE 1999, thinking they had the combination. But SPACE 1999 was actually HORROR FANTASY, and SF fans just don't respond to Horror (or if they do, it's with a different part of their literary taste buds.) SF fans at that time were somewhat allergic to Fantasy as well because most of the best selling Fantasy writers were women (SF editors wouldn't buy SF from women, so women went and made their own genre. So what else is new?)

This was such a hot-button issue in the 1970's that when I was nominated for the Best Fan Writer Hugo in 1973 for my Star Trek fanzine universe Kraith (up for free reading at
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/ ) there was a big political flap in SF fandom at Worldcon, and that was before K/S emerged.

Kraith plays with telepathic bonding and all the Theodore Sturgeon elements, Vulcan culture and its being shaped by telepathy. But those who voted against Kraith did so because it was Star Trek and was nominated by Star Trek fans who happened to be Worldcon members.

The feeling was that Worldcon was being taken over by "those people" - actor groupies who'd never read an SF novel. The disdain had a similar feel to the disdain focused on Romance and Vampire Romance. Today, Fantasy out-sells SF. If you graph the stats, I'll bet you find the same parabolic curve seen in the graph we're studying here on Vampire Romance titles.

In Science Fiction, the Hero prevails. The ending (as with Romance) has to have a specific flavor -- winning; triumph; achievement; understanding; satisfaction. Romance needs the HEA, the Happily Ever After, ending, and nothing else sells quite as well as an HEA.

An HEA can't actually be generated by a heroic success -- it isn't "Happily Ever After" if one partner forces the other to love them. That makes a good middle, but not an HEA.

SF needs the success ending, whatever success is. It has to be a definitive success and it has to be brought about by the Protagonist's personal actions which must proceed from the protagonist's ability to THINK CLEARLY. And preferably in an application of the scientific method, to resolve the plot's conflict via scientific reasoning even if the problem isn't actually a science problem.

SF became "Action-Adventure" because cerebral stories don't sell well, so publishing demanded that the SF novel end with a VICTORY imposed by FORCE of some kind - i.e. action. It wasn't enough to solve an intellectual puzzle any more. There had to be a physical problem with physical action and a physical resolution.

In the Horror genre ending, the protagonist must not prevail over Evil.

Evil can never be destroyed. The most you can achieve is to cram it into a coffer, a closet, a cave, and seal it with a magical seal that will hold for centuries, or millenia with luck. You have to leave the problem to your descendants. You can't win. That's the message of Horror. And SF is all about winning definitively, and that total triumph when a definitive solution slams into reality and changes everything.

The Horror premise is that evil is a property of reality, and reality wouldn't exist without it. Good and Evil must always be at odds, always in conflict, but neither can ever win.

The premise of SF is that humanity will prevail.

And that, as Gene Roddenberry said so many times, is the premise of Star Trek. We will go where no man has gone before, and we will prevail. We will prevail by intellect, compassion, and by wisdom. (He used that word, Wisdom, a lot in everyday talking, not just in speeches before throngs -- "When humanity will be wise ..."  )

It's a philosophical difference that the producers of Space 1999, and the next TV offering to Star Trek fans (marketed specifically to Star Trek fans) Battlestar Galactica (the original), just couldn't grasp.

And so both shows failed to capture the Star Trek audience which continued to grow and grow, through an animated Saturday morning cartoon version of Trek, through books and the films, and into several TV series, with convention after convention making headlines everywhere, even on TV news. What an embarrassment.

Eventually, Ronald D. Moore succeeded in creating a Battlestar Galactica remake that grabbed Trek fans - he had the experience.

Here's his comment on my theory of Intimate Adventure:

http://www.simegen.com/jl/intimateadventurecomments.html

That link reveals that Ronald D. Moore is a Sime~Gen reader, maybe fan, and it's posted with his permission. I did send him a set of Kraith Collected at his request.

Here's Ronald D. Moore's filmography on imdb.com

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0601822/

So after Anne Rice's first novel INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE became such a runaway best seller, Horror genre re-exploded with a new wave of Vampire novels. But they were horror vampires, bent on evil, destructive killers, not to be reasoned with, and with no shred of humanity left.

Then the Romance Genre pretty much invented THE VAMPIRE AS GOOD GUY and those books flooded the market for years. Then all of a sudden (about the time I was writing Those of My Blood - 1985-ish) you couldn't sell a Vampire Romance. Editors said don't send it, we're overstocked.

Everyone thought that meant they'd never publish any more, and the genre was a failure. I finished Those of My Blood anyway, and after more than 20 submissions (the only time that ever happened to me, and my agent was adamant that it would sell) it sold to St. Martin's Press for Hardcover. St. Martin's touted it as my breakout book. It was published in 1988. The paperback came out in 2003, but the new publisher refused to label it Vampire Romance because it takes place on the moon and so nobody would buy it. The graph we're studying begins in 1997.

Those of My Blood - Amazon Page.

Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series started with Guilty Pleasures in 2002, and either rode or created a contemporary urban fantasy Vampire Romance/Horror genre mix. Look at 2002 on that graph.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show was on the air as TV beginning in 1997 when this graph begins.

Archetypes keep creating this kind of chicken/egg problem. When you can't solve a problem, as every math student knows, it's because you haven't stated the problem correctly.

OK, so what happened with the archetypes from Star Trek (1966) to now (2009)?

That's over 40 years, two generations.

These kinds of Group Mind archetype changes span generations. See my post on generations and taste from October 2009 which really is Astrology Part 6 (the November 2009 one is Part 7) -- on Pluto and the generations:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

Think about that post on Pluto because there's more to say about how Pluto manifests via the Group Mind and why it's so clear that Astrology is utter nonsense. Let the notions soak in for a while.

Archetypes are always shifting and changing in the way they manifest, but there is (by definition) a core pattern to each archetype that is somehow inherent in all humanity and unchanging through millenia.

These patterns turn up in all cultures over all times that we've any record of. The Vampire myth is everywhere in one form or another. It's always been there, just not the subject of popular fiction. (of course "popular fiction" and "mass market" are new phenomena, and are now melting away under the force of the specialty niche market ebook!)

So what happened between the advent of Star Trek fan fiction (STAR TREK LIVES! was published in 1976 but it was based on 5 years of research in Star Trek fan fiction) and the explosion of Vampire Romance novels that continues today in a rapidly evolving form of Paranormal Romance, SFR, and Time Travel Romance, etc etc.

How could Science Fiction spawn the Romance Vampire?

Science Fiction readers tended to loathe the Romance field. Romance readers tended to loathe Horror. All vampires are horror genre.

What happened?

Before there is a runaway best seller in any new sub-genre, there has to be what Heather at http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/ called in her post
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/10/does-science-fiction-romance-need-gene.html
a "Ground Zero" where the explosion of a genre happens.

Before we get to that Ground Zero, there are usually a number of novels that do pretty well, but just don't attract any attention. Audiences build a taste for a genre slowly (actually as we're seeing here over generations), and then BOOM something hits big time. Commercialization interests notice the small following, and promote it using sly, sneaky, underhanded but effective advertising tools that cost a lot of money.

And its a generational thing. In the 1980's, there were a series of children's books for pre-teens and tweens set in High School and featuring Vampires -- evil ones, and not-so unreasonably evil ones. They conditioned an entire generation to be willing to try things with fantasy and urban fantasy - and set the stage for Harry Potter.

In 1974, my first novel, House of Zeor was published.

It's the first novel in the Sime~Gen Universe, but my first sale is a Sime~Gen story that appeared in the January 1969 issue of WORLDS OF IF Magazine edited by Fred Pohl.

House of Zeor was reviewed by Jean Lorrah with the title of the review being VAMPIRE IN MUDDY BOOTS.

The Sime~Gen Universe is built on the Good Guy Vampire with a core of pure DANGER.

As a child, I had read a number of SF works with Vampires as aliens from outer space, or otherwise built on the Vampire archetype.

But I always felt there was something wrong, something missing, something just plain out of FOCUS in these SF universes. Very often they were published as SF but would have been published as Horror if they didn't have science fiction in them.

I wrote Sime~Gen to fix what was wrong with the portrayal of Vampires. The first story, Operation High Time, is available on the Web for free reading (It's not very good, but it is short.)

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/oht.html

From 1970 to 1975 I was working on STAR TREK LIVES! researching Star Trek fanfic (and writing tons of it in Kraith which you can read online for free at http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/ ) and meeting Marion Zimmer Bradley, and marketing HOUSE OF ZEOR.

I was also raising two kids. I don't know how I did it all.

Sime~Gen, complete with Vampire archetype to the letter, came from the mid-1950's, long before I knew anything about archetypes, but I did know Vampires from SF.

I know now that what was totally missing from those early SF Vampires that I so needed to "correct" was Relationships as the plot-driver.

So that's what I wrote into House of Zeor - Relationship as a plot driver.

It's about Vampires in a Science Fiction Universe with a framework of a Romance plot, a solid love-story in every novel, a love-story that eventually shapes the way things turn out.

Sime~Gen has a hidden Fantasy premise (ESP, Magic, and the supernatural that comes out later in the novels). Because of ESP and Magick, it is disqualified as SF.

It's mixed genre with the mixture hidden so it could be published as SF (because no other genre would allow the SF part). But House of Zeor is actually a non-Horror Vampire novel with a love-story plot driver.

House of Zeor was written during and after I did a close analysis of Star Trek, Star Trek fan fiction, and why fans wrote (and read) Star Trek fan fiction.

The lead character of House of Zeor is Spock, but he's not the POV character. He's a scientist in a non-scientific world struggling to solve a problem with scientific thinking. So the book really is SF. But he's a Vampire with all that implies - except he's not supernatural, he just has supernatural Powers (but he doesn't know that).

I sold 65 copies of House of Zeor on a money-back guarantee in the expensive hardcover edition to Star Trek fans who liked Spock, and never had one returned.

I wrote House of Zeor to prove the validity of the hypothesis I set forth in Star Trek Lives! about why fans wrote stories about Spock. That's why House of Zeor had to be published before Star Trek Lives! (to see if what I said in STL! was true.)

House of Zeor connected. It was in print continuously for over 20 years, and came back in the Omnibus SIME~GEN: THE UNITY TRILOGY.

Meanwhile, Jean Lorrah joined me collaborating on Sime~Gen novels, and writing on her own in the universe, too. Many readers prefer her touch on Sime~Gen.

Further proof of my theory about the connection between the Vampire Archetype and Star Trek -- and thus the nature of the SF genre -- was supplied when fans of Sime~Gen began writing their own stories in the Sime~Gen Universe, spawning at one point, 6 publishing fanzines of fiction and non-fiction about Sime~Gen.


Much of that fan written material is currently available online for free reading, and new material is still being added at http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/

which is an index page full of links to huge sections of Sime~Gen fan activity. To read fiction, see Rimon's Library at the bottom of that page.

To read free chapters of the published novels and find links and background information on Sime~Gen see
http://www.simegen.net (net not com)
or
http://www.simegen.com/writers/simegen/

So just as Star Trek spawned fanzines of fiction (prior to Star Trek, SF 'zines contained NO FICTION, but only non-fiction, letters, opinion, personal updates, the kind of thing you find on blogs -- and like fanzines, blogs have evolved to carry fiction), so Sime~Gen spawned fanzines full of fiction, and a little non-fiction.

The Vampire is still my favorite archetype, but as GOOD GUY.

------------POINT-------------------

At last, to the point of it all.

On this blog, I've been discussing various philosophical nooks and crannies, plus a whole lot of intellectualized analysis of story telling techniques.

I've discussed marketing, and genres, and social networking and the changes wrought either because of ebooks or that ebooks are the result of other changes in the publishing industry (such as a major change in the tax laws that killed the mid-list).

And each of these individual points I've made are defining a universe of discourse for solving the problem of the attitude of the general public toward the Romance Genre, and SF Romance and Paranormal Romance, Vampire Romance, Alien Romance.

I've told you a lot about writing technique, simply asserting that doing it this way assures your story will be forgotten and doing it that way will assure that your story will be remembered and called a classic.

I've never offered any evidence that I know what I'm talking about.

But I stumbled upon a bit of evidence in the last few weeks. I only realized what it was evidence OF a couple days ago.

Sime~Gen keeps getting mentioned on various websites, even blogs. So? That's nothing new.

When my sifting tools turn up one of those mentions, I try to find time to drop the blogger a note.

I found a blog a couple weeks ago that mentioned Sime~Gen. It was fairly typical, though outstandingly articulate and well written.

http://freyashawk.blogspot.com/2009/11/sime-gen-authors-query.html

On that blog entry freyashawk says:

"Some time ago, I wrote an article about a series of books that impressed me deeply when I first read them. They were novels about the Sime-Gen universe, created by Jacqueline Lichtenberg who, with the collaboration of Jean Lorrah, then proceeded to weave an elaborate tapestry depicting an alternate future of the human race based on a strange mutation.

Rather to my astonishment, Jacqueline Lichtenberg read my article and responded with a comment a few days ago. She wrote:

'Thank you for the nice words about the Sime~Gen Universe novels.
Please let us know what format you'd like to see these novels in next.'"

And a bit down the page, it says:

"I re-read the entire collection of Sime-Gen novels and stories last year, after recommending them to some one else who, like most of her peers, was infatuated with the 'Twilight' series. To me, the Sime-Gen universe depicted the same sort of social conflict that occurred between vampire and human, with concepts of prey and predator being turned upside down by love."

FLASHBURNED INTO MEMORY

Do you see my point? These books, read decades ago, persist in memory and get REREAD, then recommended to a new generation because they compare with something very current, like THE TWILIGHT SERIES.

Freyashawk did a second post that answers my question where she is staunchly advocating the necessity of producing reprints ON PAPER because ebooks are too ephemeral:

http://freyashawk.blogspot.com/2009/11/ongoing-correspondence-with-jacqueline.html

"Use the internet by all means to promote the Sime-Gen series and network with other writers, but find a way to PRINT the books at a reasonable cost. If you do not wish to organise that aspect of it yourself, I would expect that there are countless writers' groups and small publishers who would be more than pleased to assist in this project if the behemoths of the book-publishing world are too short-sighted to involve themselves. The reputation of any small publishing venture would be enhanced greatly if it were to produce a new edition of these Classics as well as new novels in the series."

This response from readers happens because of the techniques I have described in previous posts here, starting with the 20 posts on Tarot, through all the Writing Craft posts on theme, structure, plotting, story, conflict, etc etc.

Remember Archetype and Template as discussed above in this post.

The techniques of writing craft are like the archetype or template, but it's the content -- the specifics of the story -- that matter to the reader. If those specifics matter too much to the writer who then mis-applies the template, the reader will never recieve the message, the imagery, the content that matters to the writer -- for the same reasons cited above in the section about archetypes.

These writing craft techniques when applied to archetypes that are currently changing in a Group Mind's manifestation of them (Vampires-are-Evil to Vampire-as-Good Guy, is still Vampire Archetype), produce ReReadable Books, books that are remembered for decades and recommended to new generations.

Sime~Gen so easily gets flashburned into the reader's memory because the universe premise asks questions using the Vampire archetype, questions about real world current issues that the readers don't usually know, consciously, are really bothering them. But as Gene Roddenberry taught me, don't answer the questions. Just ask.

When you ask those obtuse, difficult, ellusive questions at the nexus of change in an archetype's manifestation, you capture the attention of those to whom the content matters but the delivery vehicle does not.

The Vampire Archetype manifestations (not the archetype itself; the manifestations) were morphing with the culture through the 1970's, '80's and still are even today, reflecting cultural changes such as the role of women, of racial prejudice, sexuality, the toxicity of violence.

How do you get your way? How do you get satisfied? How do you survive a crumbling life situation? What right do you have? How do you get what you need? And even though you have a right, do you have the right to exercise that right over everyone else's objections?

In Astrology, it's all bound up in 1st House/ 7th House matters, obstructed by 4th House / 10th House matters. That's another essay, but there are the 4 archetypes that quarter our existence.

It could be that the entire paradigm underlying our world culture is shifting more massively than anyone now knows.

The element that could be shifting is all about how one gets one's needs met -- taking your fair share from whoever's trying to keep it from you; exploiting the labor of others (slavery was abolished but continued to evolve via underpaying wages spawning Labor Union's battles); Charity and giving your fair share to taxes as a means of ensuring that Charity is done properly.

Think sweeping meta-history -- history about history. Get an orbital perspective on it all.

Giving and Receiving, the biggest, most abstract (dry, boring) concept behind Kaballah.

Shifts are happening generation to generation on that most fundamental level of the asbsolute structure of the universe.

Is "Evil" a fundamental component of our "Reality" -- or can it be vanquished forever? If we vanquish EVIL, will it take GOOD with it?

Do a quick run through some video games to check subject matter and problem solving techniques. What constitutes the problem in the most popular games? What's the conflict? How is it resolved to the benefit (high score) of the player? Much of gaming is about Good and Evil at War. Primal. Nothing new there. Shades of gray would spoil the fun.

The video game is today what the Vampire novel was to kids growing up in the 1980's. An obsession. I knew it then. My Vampire Romance hardcovers, Those of My Blood (1988) and it's sequel Dreamspy (1989) are still available now in paperback.

The "Vampire" is a perfect amalgam of the issues disturbing the deepest levels of our culture, the issues where the underlying archetype of human nature is changing the way it manifests (not the actual core of human nature; just the way it manifests, the part that matters to us living creatures, is changing. 2009's Halloween included Vampire films with awesome FX.

The Vampire is still popular, more popular as Horror, but go back again and just stare at that graph of Vampire Romance titles.

http://vampchix.blogspot.com/2009/11/rise-and-fall-of-vampire-romance-and.html

Think about what that means and we'll dig into it more in future posts.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

FFFig! Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost (or why the wrong label sucks)

Heather and passengers have had some interesting and productive discussions on the labeling and categorizing of science fiction romance over on her blog, The Galaxy Express recently. This is no new discussion, but it is one we evidently must keep having because apparently even those deep in the business trenches of commercial genre fiction Don't Get It.


Case in point: Amazon. Now, many of you know I have no love for Amazon. I recognize it as a necessary evil at most times. I also recognize it's a hugely popular site and I am appreciative of their innovations in on-line book marketing and such. So given that they were one of the first, one would think--wouldn't one--that they'd know what in hell they market.

Sadly, they're perpetuating part of the deep problem science fiction romance has in declaring it's identity. Amazon--arguably one of the largest on-line marketers of books--has (if one goes to the ROMANCE categories) lumped science fiction romance/futuristics/romantic science fiction in the following category:

Fantasy, Futuristic and Ghost

If you don't believe me, click here for the Romance section with the categories on the left. Click here for their FFG category.

Notice they break out "vampires" and "time travel." They don't have a category called Fangs and Far Back in Time. Noooo. Vampire romance is recognized as a (sub)genre of its own. So is Gothic. So is Romantic Suspence. But science fiction romance? We're lumped in with elves and temporal disorientation and things that go boo.

I can understand if space was a consideration, as it would be in a brick-and-mortar store. It's not. This is a website. It's a matter of creating pages and hyperlinks to same. It's a matter of coding. It's so simple it's ridiculous.

So is lumping in science fiction romance with magic swords and ectoplasm.

Is it any wonder readers can become confused?

Granted, science fiction and fantasy have long been lumped together. But ghosts? I wasn't even aware Ghost Romance was a valid subgenre. But if it is, shouldn't it belong with vampires? I mean, vampires and ghosts seem to have more in common (at least, on Halloween they do), than starships and ghosts.

I'm now tempted to pen a story about a haunted starship that crash lands on a planet and is eaten by a dragon. At least then it would be properly categorized on Amazon.

'Nuff said. ~Linnea

http://www.linneasinclair.com/
Watch for Rebels and Lovers, Book #4 in the Dock Five Universe! Coming March 2010 from Bantam Dell

The Galaxy Express

For those of you who haven't found this discussion, yet, Heather has got a hot one going on
about science fiction romance.

http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/10/does-science-fiction-romance-need-gene.html?showComment=1255723748380#c6797085517666242508

Addiction, Danger and Flaws, Oh My!

Continuing Rowena’s theme from yesterday, I’m going to yammer on today about the flaws in characters in SFR, not just because I think it’s a worthy subject, but because I think it’s a fun one.

Rowena’s right: we do tend to load our alpha (and other) characters with problems. There are a couple of reasons for that (and many of you probably already know them if you study the craft of writing fiction).

One has to do with the Mary Sue Complex (or Marty Sam, if you will). The Mary Sue/Marty Sam is the character that is too perfect—not only to be believable—but to be likeable. Remember the girl in high school who was not only the best cheerleader but she was the prom queen and class president? Her clothes never wrinkled, her hair never frizzed and she never once had a zit. Remember how much you hated her?

That’s why we don’t write Mary Sues/Marty Sams. Readers can’t identify with them (neither can authors—my hair frizzes and my clothes and my skin both wrinkle). Instead we create characters with flaws, quirks, foibles, follies, addictions and annoying habits.

You know. Like us.

The second reason we love flawed characters is that we want to see a character succeed and grow. If the character is already perfect, there’s no growth. It was either Jack Bickham or Dwight Swain (both are writing gurus and I’m not going to drag out their tomes to figure out who said it) who said that readers have a need to pass judgment on someone (ie: character). Part of that “passing judgment” means judging whether the character DESERVES to win the book’s stated goal. If that character already has everything, is perfect, then it’s likely the reader will find some other character in some other book more deserving.

The third reason is that—according to Dwight Swain—a character “must start a fire he can’t put out” in the opening part of the book. Perfect characters don’t start fires and if they do, they can put them out, perfectly. So the “can’t put out” is lost with a perfect character.

We want the warts and all with our characters.

Only one of my characters to date had a stated addiction to a physical substance—and that’s Sully (Gabriel Ross Sullivan) in Gabriel’s Ghost and Shades of Dark. His addiction was to a substance known as honeylace—a drug of sorts, illegal except when used in religious ceremonies. Sully’s addiction to honeylace was his means of coping with the pain of what he was: a mutant human-Ragkiril, a telepathic shape shifter whose powers were feared and hated by everyone around him. Including himself. It was a combination of self-loathing and self-preservation that made him indulge in honeylace. Honeylace kept his talents muted. He needed that to survive in a world that would otherwise deem him the lowest of outcasts.

But addictions aren’t only to substances. Rhis in Finders Keepers was, quite honestly, a power addict. He was the one no one dared say “no” to. Except, of course, Trilby. She became the fire he couldn’t put out.

Branden Kel-Paten had a number of addictions, not the least of which was his obsession with Tasha Sebastian. I mean, he had her followed—for years. He hacked into her transmits. He dictated long missives to her (that he never sent). He had a secret stash of photos and holos of her. We’re talking serious addiction. (And it has been rightly pointed out that many characters in present day novels would, if real people, likely be arrested and/or committed to psych wards. But that’s because fiction is larger than real life. And—as Jacqueline Lichtenberg has wisely noted, fiction is drama.)

Kel-Paten was also obsessive with his privacy, his ship and his fleet. He was a rigid individual in many ways (his cybernetics notwithstanding) because he found solace and protection in that rigidity.

Both Admiral Mack (An Accidental Goddess) and Detective Theo Petrakos (The Down Home Zombie Blues) were work-a-holics. A benign flaw in some ways and also in some ways an addiction. Both defined themselves by their jobs. And interestingly, in Zombie Blues, so did my female protagonist, Commander Jorie Mikkalah, zombie-hunter extraordinaire. Conversely in Goddess, the last thing Gillie wanted was to be defined by her job. She didn’t want her job at all (and she clearly stated that several times in the book. She wanted to be “just Gillie.” Not a goddess. Not a sorceress. Not someone to be worshipped.) So while I paired Gillie and Mack as opposites, I paired Theo and Jorie as two sides of the same coin.

Did I do this deliberately? Yes. Why? Because of something on conflict I read on Jacqueline’s site:

"What is keeping them apart" is the CONFLICT. Misunderstanding and distrust are minor and trivial complications. The CONFLICT has to be real, about something substantive. And it has to be both INTERNAL and EXTERNAL at the same time - reflected one in the other. And each of them has to have the OBVERSE of the other's conflict if you're going to do dual-pov. Take her internal conflict,
twist it 180 degrees, and that's HIS internal conflict. (You can get a more complex novel by twisting her inner conflict into his external conflict).

I had to read that over about a dozen times before I “got it” and I’m still not sure I totally have it. But it’s something I use to work flaws and addictions and obsessions and danger into my characters and my stories.

In Hope’s Folly, one of Rya Bennton’s inner conflicts is her overwhelming sense of being unworthy. Of not being good enough, pretty enough, thin enough, experienced enough. So I took that and slapped it onto Philip Guthrie’s external issues. I put him in a situation where his previously acknowledged (and in some cases, lauded) experience, expertise and reputation were shattered. His external authority was challenged while her internal self-authority caused her pain.

Rya saw herself as flawed. Philip was born with the proverbial and clichéd silver spoon in his mouth. But because of that, his personal expectations were also very high. And the higher you are, the more painful the landing when you fall.

They both fell…and fell in love.

Flaws and all.

~Linnea

www.linneasinclair.com

The Assumption of Ever After

What differentiates a romance-genre book from, say, a woman’s fiction novel or a mystery novel is—according to industry pundits—the requirement in a romance-genre novel of the HEA. The Happily Ever After. This, like a lot of terms in publishing, is shorthand for a style and a series of events that will leave the reader with a positive feeling a book’s end, rather than puzzlement, depression, horror or whatever you’d like to tack on.

That’s why strictly speaking neither Gone With The Wind nor Romeo and Juliet qualify as romance-genre fiction. They don’t end with a positive (happy) commitment between the two lead characters.

Interestingly, what seems to twist the anti-grav panties of the SF set is this very same thing: the HEA. The Happily Ever After. This seems to be a kicking-point when speculative fiction is combined with romance.

What I’ve found interesting, though, is that the non-romance reading set in SF seems to layer a deeper assumption of EVER AFTER on to that HAPPILY than many of the authors—myself included—intend.

A month or so back, in a shameless and blatant effort to get a buzz going for my February 24, 2009 release, Hope’s Folly, I offered electronic ARCS (Advance Reader Copies) to a handful of book bloggers. Most had read me before. Most were chosen because they’d read me before. Stacking the deck, Linnea? Sure. But Folly is book three in the Gabriel’s Ghost/Dock Five universe (both monikers are floating around out there.) I’m not out there to get bloggers to go WTF? as they try to catch up with the storyline.

But as happens with electronic copies, they get passed around to other bloggers (and I’m fine with that). So I was interested to find a blog comment on Hope’s Folly on a blog (Oct. 16, 2008) I’d not specifically sent the ARC to. The comment was decently positive except it raised the issue I’ve started to raise above. The assumption of EVER AFTER.

To wit: “I'm not a romance reader; I'm very much a sf/f reader. Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that I really enjoyed the sf parts and was mildly appalled at the romance parts. I can't buy True Love between characters who've known each other a week. That's infatuation. That is not a good foundation for a lasting relationship. *sigh*”

Things like this make me want to pound my head on my desk, more than I usually do.

**SPOILER**

Here’s a direct quote from the Folly manuscript where the main character is giving some very realistic appraisal to his impromptu and admittedly foolish marriage to the other main character:

“So, how’s our second week of dating going so far?” he asked. Most people dated first, then got married, but that wasn’t how their life had worked out. Marrying her had been an impulsive move. But it was a move he wanted to be permanent.

So did Rya. The fact that she now had her M-R-S degree, as she called it, was no guarantee of permanency. A real marriage took work. Commitment. Patience and respect.

And that took time.

So now they were dating. Married but dating. Philip rather liked the idea.

Am I—via the character—not saying exactly that? People in real life and in books get married for all sorts of reasons, many of them not the wisest or best. They either make it or they don’t but they do—in fiction and in real life—have the option of trying.

At book’s end—and this is really the last two pages—that’s all my characters are doing: realizing the situation they’re in is not the easiest and asserting that they’re willing to at least try.

Since when does TRY equate LASTING?

In the minds of SF readers who read romance, that’s when. I’ve seen this corollary far too often in blogs and reviews from SF-ers dabbling into SFR.

They assume—ASSUME—that because the two main characters are in a compatible situation on the last page that it’s white picket fence and roses forever.

None of my books promise that. None.

It’s an OPTION. It’s never a GIVEN.

My books end—as most of my readers know—at a point where the two main characters in the romantic relationship have either overcome or ignored whatever major conflicts separated them and are willing now to give their relationship the biggest, bestest try they can. That’s all. It’s a potential of a future together but it is not a guarantee of a future together.

Now, for romance readers who want to envision a FOREVER for my characters, that’s fine. Again, it’s an option. Not a given. But at least the romance readers aren’t damning me for it. Or—to take what I would see to be the opposite side of the coin—they don’t write in blogs that I haven’t shown the two main characters breathing their lasts breaths together at age ninety-nine and then going on to be buried side-by-side in graveyard plots marked Mr. and Mrs.. That, to me, is as much of an off-base interpretation of a science fiction romance novel as it is to assume that the characters have, at book’s end, a perfect and forever after relationship simply because they’ve decided to HAVE a relationship.

Let’s parse that blogger’s comment:

“I can't buy True Love between characters who've known each other a week. That's infatuation. “

Of course it’s infatuation. Every relationship one week in is highly based on infatuation. Physical (and other) attraction. But without infatuation, without physical (and other) attraction, the relationship would never start. That is where relationships start and from there the infatuation matures and the physical attraction matures and the relationship matures.

Moreover, in Folly, both character are very aware this attraction is nuts, too soon and at the wrong time. And they spend a lot of book-time realizing that:

Rya stayed by the ladderway, alternately damning herself and calling herself an idiot. She now had a ridiculous, full-blown crush going on Admiral Philip Guthrie, and every time she thought she’d managed to get hold of her emotions and shake some sense into her head, he’d lean against her or look at her with those damned magnificent eyes, and her toes would curl and she was lost.

Again.

This was just so very much not like Rya Taylor Bennton. She did not get crushes on guys—not since she was ten years old, anyway. Rya Taylor Bennton found hard-bodies who amused her and bedded them. Sex was fun, great exercise, super stress relief. Nothing more.

Then Philip had walked—well, limped—back into her life, amid guns blazing and punches flying. And in two, three short hours her life changed.

Further, I never said it was True Love. The characters never say it’s True Love. Rya sees it as a ridiculous crush.

As for Philip:

He was certifiably insane. He was sure of it. These past few months, the physical damage his body had taken, the stresses of losing one command and gaining another, the deaths of friends and crew—it had all taken a toll. That was the only explanation he could come up with as to why he was so emotionally vulnerable to—and fixated on—Cory Bennton’s twenty-nine year old daughter.

This had to stop. But when the lights had failed again and he’d almost found her in his lap, and then when all means to escape the ready room were exhausted and she was again those few tantalizing inches away from him, and he had the damned stupidity to make the flippant comment that if he’d been ten years younger...

Hell’s fat ass. He was certifiably insane.

She was twenty-nine. She was Cory’s daughter. She had some young buck named Matt hot for her back on Calth 9. She was not for Philip Guthrie, divorced, jaded, and limping around like some ancient—yeah, Welford had deemed him so—relic.

Plus, he had a ship to refit and a war to get under way.

But when he was around Rya... he just wanted to keep being around Rya.

This was not good.

Both realize AND TELL THE READER they’re not at the point to experience True Love. They can, however, experience the beginnings of an attraction that can lead to love and can, legitimately, share that they feel that way. Just like in real life.

What I feel I’m seeing here and in other blog comments like this is an unwitting-or-otherwise filling in of the blanks: This is a romance so this must be about True Love. (Side Note: I don’t think one can define True Love and I wouldn’t attempt to.) There is an assumption that an HEA ending also means Perfection. No more problems, ever. (Tell that to Dallas and Roarke in JD Robb’s IN DEATH series.)

Maybe at one time in romance novels, the Ever After in the HEA acronym did mean an unequivocal forever. But looking at romance fiction today, I don’t think that’s true anymore. I don’t think romance readers buy into “Perfect.” I think romance readers do relate to and respect characters who TRY. Who care enough to TRY.

Moreso in SFR, where there are so many other variables, I think a white-lace-and-roses perfect romance ending would be unrealistic. I don’t write them. That’s why I’m so surprised when some readers take it upon themselves to insert them—and then damn me for it.

I don’t see the same SF readers assuming every one of the antagonists or every one of the political problems is completely vanquished at the end of an Honor Harrington book or the end of a Cherryh book. Cherryh’s FOREIGNER series is, what, eight, ten+ books in? And Bren Cameron still has a lot of work to do. I can’t think of one SF or Fantasy novel I’ve ever read where I felt that Life Was Perfect from thereon in for the characters. Even if the bad guy was shredded, the princess rescued the prince, and the evil empire was in disarray.

I don’t know why some readers cement the assumption of an unequivocal Ever After onto many romance novel endings when they clearly don’t depict that. They DO detail it is possible. They do NOT detail it is absolute.

One more note on the “one week” comment and “That is not a good foundation for a lasting relationship.”

I know this gal who picked up this guy in a bar in New Jersey back in February of 1979. End of February, to be exact. It was strictly on physical attraction: he was a 6’4”, green-eyed, blonde-haired hunk. They didn’t see each other nearly as much as Rya and Philip do. There was no daily basis thing. There also wasn’t the chance to see each other under fire, working, striving and surviving, which I think adds a different dimension to how and when a relationship progresses. But even given the normal weekend dating kind of thing, and the nightly telephone calls, this guy moved in with this gal after three weeks. He gave her an engagement ring shortly thereafter.

This guy and this gal will hit their 29th wedding anniversary in October of 2009.

Okay, this guy and this gal didn’t know True Love in one week. It took three weeks. And almost thirty years later, it’s still there.

I love you, Robert.

~Linnea

HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/

It's an impossible mission on a derelict ship called HOPE'S FOLLY. A man who feels he can't love. A woman who believes she's unlovable. And an enemy who will stop at nothing to crush them both.