Paranormal Romance

This post leads up to a workshop exercise in World Building.

A couple weeks ago, Linnea Sinclair asked on the Paranormal Romance forum at goodreads.com if SF Romance should be a subcategory under Paranormal Romance. I've been haunted by the topic ever since.

Opinions varied widely. People looking for "Paranormal" don't want any nuts-n-bolts mixed in with their ghosts, vampires and werewolves.

I can understand that. There are times I want my Paranormal straight up, no ice. But I always like my SF with some telepaths or other Scientific Law Breaking element.

That is one (of the many) things essential to a good SF story, the confounding of all expectations.

SF is about the effect of science on PEOPLE (human and not), about the approach to The Unknown, and about the way that Relationships affect what Science can and can't do.

SF was (not any more) about the maverick kid who solves adult problems by inventing something adults think is impossible. Today it's a much more adult and complex field, so it's much harder to define. Still, there is a unifying pattern in SF that joins it directly to Fantasy and thus Paranormal Romance.

So to set off the train of plot events leading to a unique Relationship, the SF story starts with an Idea.

The Idea has the form, "What if ..." or "If only ..." or "If This Goes On ..." And the idea that sparks the story leaps over all mental and emotional barriers. On internal emotional barriers: see my post from last week about The Tower Card and mental barriers
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/paradigm-shift.html

So SF relies on a story springboard that leaps over all mental and emotional barriers in the reader to suppose something that "simply can not be!" under the current understanding of reality. And right there, the reader is sucked into a world that can't exist. That's what's FUN about SF -- it violates the laws of reality as the reader knows them.

At core, SF is about breaking the rules that confine imagination.

Almost by definition, Science Fiction is about venturing outside your comfort zone.

But what's the difference between SF and Fantasy -- and between Fantasy and Romance?

Today, we're all looking to mix and match genres, to adventure where no woman has gone before, while most readers of Romance of any sub-genre don't want to be dragged outside their comfort zone. The comfort zone may enlarge or change, but the average Romance reader doesn't want to cross that borderline for fun.

Readers are looking for a good adventure into a unique but satisfying relationship, a story with an optimistic ending, HEA or better.

Part of the fun of the Paranormal Romance is finding that great story interwoven into a background that changes the story without distorting or marring it. (What if that hot new boyfriend is actually a Vampire?) The Romance has to grow out of the background, be caused by the background, but still be our own beloved story.

For years the Gothic satisfied that itch. Stories about inherited old houses with resident ghost, brooding mysterious neighbor, or spooky powers held endless fascination because they had endless variations.

And the Regency Romance delved into a period of history that twanged the fantasy nerve just as Western Romance did -- marvelously alien dress codes, women resisting or secretly thwarting the power men had over them, behavior and manners that could be an alien language. Regency England was indeed another planet! SF Fandom gravitated to the Regency Romance and to this day hold a Regency Ball at conventions -- The Regency Romance is SF.

Then the Vampire As Good Guy appeared, venturing over from the adult fantasy lines spun off of Science Fiction where the Vampire was usually a bad guy hero such as Linnea was talking about in her post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/redemption-rake-and-reluctant-hero.html

Emma Bull's Hugo Award winning novel, War For The Oaks, launched an urban fantasy revolution, and before long we had Laurell K. Hamilton's genre busting Anita Blake urban fantasy. And of course Buffy. Now Harry Dresden in Butcher's THE DRESDEN FILES combines it all - bad guy hunk, angst, magic, even his ex who became a vampire. He's not a private eye. He's a private wizard! (that private wizard part is one of my oldest old time favorites)

But where did it all start? And what is the DIFFERENCE between SF and Fantasy and Romance?

How many of you remember the mid-1950's story which was Marion Zimmer Bradley's first sale, (I think to Vortex Magazine? 1952? Or Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955?) called Centaurus Changeling which has been widely heralded as the very first SF story that had RELATIONSHIP in it at the plot level -- relationship beyond rescuing the damsel in distress.

Prior to publication of Centaurus Changeling, SF was "Neck Up Science Fiction" -- it was aimed at adolescent boys who didn't want to deal with emotions.

Marion Zimmer Bradley changed that aim of the genre and began to serve the interests of young women, too. But it didn't seem like it for yet another 20 years or so, though her Darkover novels were being published and scarfed up by an ever increasing fandom, mostly female.

So with Darkover as the thin sliver of a wedge, gradually SF with a relationship and emotion driven plot was introduced.

So what is Darkover? It's a story about telepaths who have all sorts of other ESP powers and with those powers on their far-away lost colony planet called Darkover, they do everything that Science does for us from heal the sick to mining and smelting metal, and even making atom bombs.

On Darkover, technology is driven by ethics. Morals. And passionate love affairs as well as passionless arranged marriages.

See my comment on Linnea Sinclair's post which is about Moral Hazard -
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/redemption-rake-and-reluctant-hero.html

So what is the Darkover series? Is it SF? Or is it Fantasy? World Wreckers is certainly one of the best Romances I've ever read and it's about ecological warfare. (she wrote it in response to Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness which is SFRomance too -- or more exactly Alien Romance which is the topic of this blog. I expect all of you have studied and dissected Left Hand of Darkness -- the Worldbuilding she did with that won her both the Hugo and the Nebula with one book.)

In Science Fiction, the scientific laws that are challenged or broken by the story premise are from the physics, math and chemistry we all know and love. The plot mysteries are solved by applying laboratory science.

The Fantasy field split off from SF, and for decades the only Fantasy readers were SF readers too. But gradually it came to be that only women wrote Fantasy and mostly only women read it. Then that changed too. I think there may be more men writing adult Fantasy today then women. (by "adult" I don't mean sexually explicit).

But I'm still looking for the DIFFERENCE where the split between SF and Fantasy occurred.

I see a similarity so glaring it wipes out all differences.

In Fantasy -- Paranormal, Urban, whatever -- in Fantasy the scientific laws that are challenged or broken by the story premise are from parapsychology, mythology, archeology, anthropology.

The thinking that generates that Law Breaking story premise is precisely the same as the thinking that goes into an SF story premise.

From the writer's point of view, Fantasy and SF are identical.

"What if were-creatures had legal rights?" (Laurell K. Hamilton created what is called in Hollywood a High Concept with that one.) And all of a sudden, Earth becomes a galactic civilization in microcosm with dozens of sentient species co-existing.

Both SF and Fantasy do alternate history and parallel worlds and time travel.

I see no real difference except in the backgrounding that delineates what is "real" and what is "not real" -- what can and what can not exist in the story-universe.

Which brings me back to the Tarot posts and the Astrology posts I've done on this blog. I've shown how I see Science as a branch of Magic, or of Philosophy. Science studies 1/44th of the reality structured by the philosophy illustrated by the Tree of Life.

Science is a special case of the much larger subject of Philosophy in which you can account for the Soul and all kinds of ESP type powers.

Neck-Up Science Fiction, Science Fiction pre-Marion Zimmer Bradley, deals with 1/44th of the realm of storytelling.

And clearly, from the discussion Linnea Sinclair stirred up on goodreads.com, the largest coherent market for novels (Romance Readers) cares as much or more for the BACKGROUND (i.e. the rules of science or magic behind the story) as they do about the Romance itself.

BACKGROUND is what readers see. WORLDBUILDING is how writers put it there to be seen.

Readers see a distinction based on the setting and background. Enjoyment is at least as dependent on the background as on the story.

A distinction which I see as no distinction at all is of vital importance to a huge readership, Paranormal Romance readers.

I think I see a reason for this. It is often referred to as "accessibility" -- and I'm not entirely sure what exactly that means.

But here's a blog post from 2005 discussing the accessibility of science fiction today. This pertains directly to another issue we've discussed on this blog, how to elevate the reputation of Romance in general but Alien Romance or SFR or PNR in the eyes of the general population.

http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003914.html

He makes the point that SF just isn't "accessible" the way say Harry Potter is.

And I don't think it's the STORY as such that isn't accessible. It's the background that isn't accessible to the typical Romance reader.

Romance Readers aren't uneducated. They just have a different education, one that emphasizes philosophy, mythology, literature, sociology, psychology (Marion Zimmer Bradley's education was in psychology) -- the soft sciences.

Reading for relaxation, you want to play with what you know, not stretch to learn something new which is what you do at work all day every day. When your brain is tired, you want to stop learning.

So the challenge in Scalzi's blog is to create SF that's accessible like Harry Potter.

The challenge for us then is to create Alien Romance or Paranormal Romance with a background that's "accessible" to the sort of reader who would like the story.

And as we've seen with Laurell K. Hamilton, what it takes to reach a large audience is a High Concept (a trick I'm not good at.)

So when you're not good at something, you practice. Let's practice.

On my writing workshop blog, I'll put up a story opening and a challenge to wrap WORLDBUILDING around the story to make it accessible. This will call for OUTLINING which is what Blake Snyder calls a BEAT SHEET.

The BS Beat Sheet works perfectly for novels, and at this stage of developing the Worldbuilding for a story, it doesn't matter if it's a novel or a movie or TV Series, the essence of the craft is the same.

You can download Snyder's Beat Sheet for free here

http://www.blakesnyder.com/tools/

If you're a writing student, consider this part of your million words for the garbage can. If you're a publishing writer, come play with us and see if you can do something you've never done before.
I will dare to predict that one of you will learn something from this exercise that will solve the acceptability problem for SFR.

http://www.editingcircle.blogspot.com/

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

World-building. How off Earth do you tell time?

Have you ever thought of "Time" as a problem?
Maybe not.
If all your alien romance action takes place on one planetary body, or moon, you might start with the local sun or star, and measure time by the orbit.
But what if the orbit wobbles?

I suppose you could have Leap Years on a grand scale.

If the sun is a Cepheid Variable, (not recommended, too unstable) can you rely on light to predict time?

What if there are two suns? Suppose you have several moons?

And supposing your civilization is on a space ark, or a tora, or a space station --like Babylon 9-- populated in a democratic manner by peoples from many galaxies. How would they agree on what time "Standard Time" is? Whose moon --or watch-- would rule?

Would there be Time wars?

Why do the military use a 24 hour clock, and civilians use a 12 hour (plus am/pm)?

Even on our own little world, we've had different calendars and almanacs as current world rulers have dabbled, and named months after themselves, and got egotistically involved in whether or not "their" month is bigger and longer than their rivals' months.

If any super power ever elects a President named February, watch out!

Even if "we" all agree on Greenwich Mean Time (time is "mean" ?) we live in different time zones, and when we fly across an international date line, we travel in time. And if we leave one atomic clock at Greenwich, and whizz another identical one around the globe in orbit, they don't tell the same time. (Twin paradox).

So what would happen to fast-moving --but not equally fast-- spaceships? Do you think, instead of talking about the weather (as Englishmen are supposed to do), friendly spacefarers would chat about the time all the time?

In FORCED MATE, I decided to base time-telling in the Tigron Empire on a regular, predictable, reliable event: the alien female cycle. "The third thing females are good for."

That presupposes mammalian females, and reproductive cycles, and also that gravity, velocity, the space diet etc do not interfere with biology. What else is regular and reliable?

Heartbeats? Just imagine if time passed more quickly when we are frightened, or sexually active, or doing our gym-rat thing!

This week, Barbara Vey blogged on Thursday about a sex myth quiz. You can find a link to Barbara Vey's blog through the bloglinkhoppers link.

Spoiler alert!

Apparently, the average, healthy, human male (at least three loopholes, there) produces 300 million spermatoza every day. Imagine trying to tell time based on that reliable number! Of course, this is not a serious suggestion. It would be totally unmanageable and impracticable.

On that happy thought.... I'll leave you to go spoof something.

Best wishes,
Rowena

PS. Check out the Sampler of 10 current and former Dorchester FF&P authors' first chapters.

Rowena Cherrry

If I had to... could I?

Before I write about my sometimes alien heroines, I research the Earthly equivalent of the situations into which I dump them, and I like to think that if I were their age, in the shape they are in, and in similar circumstances, I could do almost as well.

But could I?

Could I purify and filter water without a commercial tablet or a store-bought gadget on my plumbing as Djetth (Jeth) does in Insufficient Mating Material? I know how in theory, and what I wrote passed muster with my survival consultant.

If global warming reduced my neighborhood to something close to a dust bowl, could I find water by making a solar still? Could I follow my own survival advice that I dish up in Insufficient Mating Material?

If I decided that I no longer trusted prepared, packaged foods from the supermarket, could I make pizza from scratch... on a hot rock?

Well, could I?

Maybe not pizza, if I didn't have yeast, but I might surprise myself. We women may be tougher than we think.

Actually, I used to make pizza when I lived in Dorset. I had a coal fired oven, which meant that I had to shovel coal into the fire box, wait for it to get really hot, and then bake. My paternal grandmother didn't have a refrigerator. She had a slab of marble in a cupboard under the stairs!

But as for doing some of the things Survivorman does.... I'm not sure, and I hope I never find out, but I pay attention, and I'm thinking of buying some of the best fire making tools I've seen him use on his show, and keeping them in my handbag. It won't do much for the shape of my bag, but a bit of extra weight-lifting should keep my arms and my bones in shape.

Insufficient Mating Material contains quite a lot of information from various survival sources and the consultative wisdom of Survivorman, Les Stroud. Like the alien hero, Djetth (Jeth), I took part in competitive life-saving at school. I still have all the badges that I earned. However, when I think back to all the mushrooms we used to gather in the local cow pastures at dawn, and the berries we picked from hedgerows in Autumn: hips and haws, elderberry, crabapples, blackberries, I wonder whether I'd dare to today, if I weren't desperate.

The problem is (for everyday people), practising making shelters by cutting down vegetation is not environmentally responsible, and experimenting with strange berries when I don't have to seems to be asking for trouble... and I don't mean experimenting in the way that Djetth and Martia-Djulia experiment once their alien romance heats up.

Best wishes,

Rowena

Strange Brews

I think my aural memory is very good, but sometimes it isn't.

For instance, I was absolutely certain that I knew the opening lines to The Eagles quintessentially seventies song "Life in the Fast Lane."

Mea culpa. I thought the heroine was terminally vain.

I listened to that song a lot while writing about Insufficient Mating Material's fashionista heroine who was so pampered, she could not even undress without the hero's help, and the slightly brutal Djetth (Jeth).

It wasn't my imaginary theme song for the book, but I felt an affinity.

A couple of days ago, I learned that the heroine was "terminally pretty" (to rhyme with "the hard cold city"). How devastating to know that I have been mistaken for more than two decades!

OK. I will admit it. I loved The Cream song, Strange Brew but I never have been clear what it is about. When I was a giddy youth, I didn't read the transcripts on the backs of LPs.

These songs recapture my happiest memories -- well... I should modify that, but the late sixties, seventies and eighties were fabulous, and that's when I had time to listen to the radio, and when I judged potential boyfriends by their record collections.

Did anyone else do that? Or am I truly weird?

LP-Harmony!!!!

I've also been polling my internet acquaintances about their opinions of Newsletters put out by authors, because I am on a panel speaking about the virtues of Newsletters on behalf of the EPIC organization (for electronically published authors) at the upcoming Romantic Times convention.

More than once as my questionnaires came back to me, I heard that readers love recipes in authors' newsletters. Good grief, people are interested in what I eat, whether I cook it, and what ingredients I use! Who knew?

Music, recipes... now add Linnea Sinclair's barman, Sin.

When you write do you follow the What's In Your Wallet? line of characterization?

Some characterization pundits advise authors to make lists of what is in their heroes' pockets.

(I tried that in Insufficient Mating Material, with good reason. My survival consultant, Les Stroud, aka Survivorman always tells the Science Channel viewer what, apart from his multi-tool, is in his pocket when he is stranded on a deserted island or other hostile-to-life spot.)

How about, What's In Your Drink? (I have paranoid, intergalactic superspy heroes who wonder that, too.)

Let's take world-building to an appropriate level. What do your inter-stellar characters drink for survival, for sustenance, for pleasure, and for a buzz?

Is it basically a gin and tonic with dye in it? Is it green small beer? (That's a fraction deeper than you think). Is it Blue Curacao with vodka? Is water the champagne of the future? Or serum?

Who saw Antz? The Bar Scene? Drinking from the aphids' butts (not that I recommend it, but does it have potential for an alien lifestyle)? There was another bar scene in An Ant's Life. Cartoons can be highly creative.

Well, here's the kicker.

Tonight (Sunday 9 -11 pm Eastern), April Fools' Night, with the moon all but full, Linnea, Susan, Colby and Rowena are going to be appearing in character on the Passionate Internet Voices Radio in order to put the lot together.

We'll be in Linnea's Intergalactic Bar and Grille (a franchise thereof) with Sin the bartender making otherwordly drinks. And we'll be planning a big surprise for Earth.

Best wishes,

Rowena

Disparate things and unfinished business

This image has absolutely nothing to do with Cindy's sagging middle, or Jacqueline's evolutionary preferences... it has to do with mine, perhaps.

Also with unfinished business.

On reading Jacqueline's fascinating blog about world-building, the two books I thought of were H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (I confess... it was not so much the book as the movie with Jeremy Irons as the troglodite-predator branch of homo sapiens) and The Sparrow.

Both books had a predator and a prey species who looked similar. In the case of The Sparrow, it was a matter of convergent evolution. The predator evolved to look like its prey, so that hunting would be less strenuous.

If I'm going to have a predator and prey species in my books, I'd like the predatory males to be attractive, and to have a limited interest in eating prey females.

I can say that. In both The Sparrow and the Jeremy Irons movie, a predator wanted to have intercourse with a female member of the prey species. Now, the female prey wasn't keen on the idea, in one case because it was dangerous... like a deer going to bed with a lion, in the other, because Jeremy looked and acted a bit like an Uruk-Hai.

Now, the Uruk-Hai were buff and ripped, a bit too ripped in some cases, really, but they had terrible dentition and I'm sure their breath was unimaginably bad.

The problem with all this for mainstream literature is human taboos. If we were lion-men, as a society we'd probably imprison any lion-man who indulged his attraction to a deer-lady.

Our culture has fewer issues when the predator is, or claims to be, a god. At least when I was a schoolgirl, we studied Greek and Roman literature in school. We didn't bat an eyelid when a honking great male swan (who was the king of all gods in disguise) gave Leda a couple of double-yolked eggs. Or when he turned a girlfriend into a cow so he could continue the affaire without upsetting his wife.

OK. His wife was upset anyway.

Zeus's other disguises included being a bull (now that is scary, and impractical, you'd think) and a golden shower (!).

For the last fifteen or so years, I've chosen to write alien romances about "gods from outer space" which allows me to cherry-pick items from our culture that I'd like to claim the gods gave us... like chess and fortune-telling. It's rather like the point Margaret made about our language stealing choice words from other nationalities, only --perhaps-- in reverse.

As for the picture, it's concept art from a work in progress and I put it up here simply for a bit of visual interest. I've gone back to Ed Traxler who created my Insufficient Mating Material slideshow to produce a slide show for the e-book Mating Net (a short story).

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry
rowenacherry.com