Worldbuilding For Fantasy Part 1 - Paranormal Detectives

Worldbuilding For Fantasy

Part 1

Paranormal Detectives

This Series on Worldbuilding for Fantasy is inspired by some very original worldbuilding in the Rivers of London Series (8 books as of 2020) by Ben Aaronovitch.  Book 7, Lies Sleeping brings together many of the mysteries we've been probing, "Love Conquers All," "Happily Ever After," and whether you need Magic or a Paranormal premise to understand Happiness?  Is Happiness supernatural?  What exactly is happiness?

One would expect building a world to house a fictional drama would be the same for Science Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Western, Historical, or Fantasy.

The process is, actually, mostly the same, at least at the beginning where the story Idea first blossoms.  The process diverges later, as you decorate with symbols, visuals, and plot-clues, foreshadowing, and then sketch out the whole rest of the world beyond the story-venue.

The most efficient way to build a world, destined for any (or all) genres, is to start by studying your audience's everyday existence, their "world" - the boundary between what they know to the point of boredom and all the "here be dragons" boundaries of their world.

Thus children's books are easy to world build for, but much-much harder to write.  You have to be careful not to talk down to children, while at the same time imparting a vision of what the next stage of their maturation is all about.

The same is actually true of adults.

The work-a-day adult actually lives in a fairly small world, associating with a few people, maybe a couple hundred, commuting the same route, shopping the same stores, grabbing fast food at the same stand-up counter.

That is changing rapidly now, as circumstances have boosted the use of work-from-home.  Working online both reduces the number of people you see daily, but increases the number you interact with.

The Romance Writer must change with the times.

Thus today's working-stiff population is trending toward having a larger view of the world, via Facebook etc., knowing what's going on in the lives of people they barely know.

Many read Romance mixed with almost anything - Victorian  Dukes, Cowboy Drifters, -- unexpectedly different but intriguing men attracted to women of strong character, driving ambition, determined to achieve a goal.

If you have a story to tell of Alien Romance -- meeting up with a VERY "different" sort of person from somewhere you've never heard of and can't imagine, Science Fiction is a natural choice.  But Fantasy, alternate-reality worlds where Magic is Real, is also a great venue to place a story of Impossible Love.

Love Conquers All.

The cliche is a cliche because it's true.

So if you want to tell the tale of an Impossible Love with a story-arc that transforms the impossible into the possible, that moves the border around your reader's life, that enlarges the known world, Paranormal Romance is a natural.

In other words, take our Real World, change something we take for granted, and build an entire world around that one difference.  And you'll have your alternate-reality where one of your characters grew up.

Now, bring that Character into the reader's reality and spur his adjustment.

This describes Gini Koch's ALIEN series,

and the feature film STARMAN - as well as THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.

Those are all technically science fiction.

What makes a World you Build into a Fantasy world?

When we insert a Paranormal element (ghost, magic, gnomes), the publishing establishment labels the result Fantasy.

But what, exactly, is Paranormal?

Google the word.
--------
par·a·nor·mal
/ˌperəˈnôrm(ə)l/
Learn to pronounce
adjective
denoting events or phenomena such as telekinesis or clairvoyance that are beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding.
"a mystic who can prove he has paranormal powers"
-----

And further down the Google results, note:

---------

What is the difference between paranormal and supernatural?
The paranormal genre includes creatures like zombies, werewolves, aliens, and ghosts, as well as phenomena like telepathy and time travel. “Supernatural” refers to phenomena that are forever outside the realm of scientific explanation, such as god, the afterlife, and the soul.Jan 21, 2020

 ---------

Note how neither explanation of the word is useful to a writer attempting to craft a world that at least several publishers would buy to be published under a Paranormal or Fantasy imprint.

The vocabulary of the English language is under as much swift, drastic change as is our general lifestyle.

Wikipedia offers this modernized take on the word, Paranormal:

-----quote------
Paranormal
Description Paranormal events are purported phenomena described in popular culture, folk, and other non-scientific bodies of knowledge, whose existence within these contexts is described as beyond normal experience or scientific explanation.

------end quote------

Note the very non-dictionary choice of wording, prejudicing the reader before the definition is offered.  "Purported" and "non-scientific" both telegraph the writer's opinion that anything called Paranormal is in fact non-existent, non-sensical, or only uneducated people would be so gullible as to think any of those things could happen.

"Popular Culture" or just "Popular" also telegraphs the writer's opinion that such ideas are beneath notice, unworthy of the educated who would never be part of "the populace."

If you, as a developing writer, haven't yet studied semantics and the semantic loading of words, do so before attempting to craft a Paranormal Novel.

If you note how "Paranormal" is used to designate movies (study the movies with that label), you'll see how the meaning of the word is warped and reshaped by common usage.

You can do that with the World you build -- you can take everyday English words and redefine them with a different emotional impact, a different semantic loading.

The most easily available laboratory for learning to do that is today's News Headlines -- almost every one you see, including CNN and Fox News, contains some word that telegraphs to the reader how to evaluate and respond to the information in the item. Become sensitive to that and you will improve your Paranormal Worldbuilding ability a hundred fold.

Another way to explore how modern publishers are re-defining vocabulary is to read novels.

I want to point you to a very popular writer who has built a complex "Paranormal" world with science fiction-detective style plots, where the detective is a Magic User and able to detect where "magic" (which is never actually defined) has been used.

The RIVERS OF LONDON series by Ben Aaronovitch (set in an alternate but not very different London) is from DAW Books -- very prominent Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher I sold a few books to when it was under previous management.

The advent of DAW publishing is a whole phenomenon all by itself - the first publisher of its kind.

Aaronovitch has painted a picture of "reality" that includes the personification of a River who can have sex with the Main Character, a Detective who can detect magic traces after the fact.

The Magic specialty division of law enforcement is after an Arch Criminal who has given them a lot of trouble, and who is building a magic artifact, a giant bell.  It's unclear what the results of letting that bell ring might be, but the indications are that it would bring an entity from another dimension that would then "rule the world" (megalomaniac style, rule).

The Rivers of London Series is a huge best seller, but is structured like an ordinary Detective Novel.  The personality of the Detective is what carries the story, but the world he lives in holds many astonishing surprises for the reader.

The science fiction overtones come from the adroit handling of some of these astonishing surprises -- just like the Characters on Star Trek, the Characters in LIES SLEEPING just take the astonishing factoids for granted.

They use their magical tools to track down and thwart the villain.

But there is a sterility to the story telling, very much like a Colombo episode, rather than anything like the Decker/Lazarus series by Faye Kellerman (that I keep reviewing here -- a series you should study for the HEA depiction).


The Main Character has a "thing" going with a female avatar of a River, but there's no conflict or story advancement there.  The plot is all about chasing the Villain, unraveling his plot, putting the kibosh on his plans to use Magic.

There is no penetrating thematic argument asserting WHY this alternate Reality is essential to the well-being of our everyday reality.  There is no actual conflict having to do with the way the Characters are embedded in their reality.

Note, by contrast, how Jim Butcher, in his Dresden Files Series, has chosen a Character who is embedded in, irked by, shaped by, challenged by, his environment.  His identity as a Wizard gives him only one way to earn a Living - basically as a consulting detective, or Paladin for Hire. His work brings him athwart the Great Powers running his world.

He is very conspicuously a Native of that alternate reality.

Ben Aaronovitch's Detective, who actually works for a government agency, officially, floats apart from his world. It doesn't shape his character, even when he takes advantage of it.  He shrugs off the bizarre reality of having shacked up with a River (I mean a real one, flowing water and all -- with an Avatar that is never explained properly).

Now Lies Sleeping is part of a Series - and if you drop into the middle here, you wouldn't expect all the explanation that went before.  But there should be more than there is.  The absence of these connecting links leaves us with an interesting Character - who floats disconnected from his reality.

Note carefully -- RIVERS OF LONDON is an international best selling series. People keep buying installments for a reason.

There might be an appetite for stories about people just coping their way through a world that is irrelevant to them.

Paranormal Fantasy lends itself easily to this sort of novel - disconnected from our reality, with Characters as disconnected from their Reality as we feel we are from today's reality.

There are a lot of "magic using detective" novels selling very well these days - and that might be because Detective Procedurals are traditionally about an objective onlooker (the Detective) prying into affairs disconnected from their personal life.

Detective novels hold particular appeal for those who want a rest from drowning in "soap opera" reality with husband, kids, cousins, clashing personalities, demanding bosses, etc.

Solving a puzzle external to the Self provides a much needed respite from Reality.

Science Fiction as a genre usually pivots around a mystery -- a scientific mystery that needs explaining by a discovery, by learning that some impossible thing is actually real.

Science Fiction is about confronting The Unknown.

Paranormal is about confronting The Unknown.

Romance is about confronting The Unknown (hence the popularity of the Arranged Marriage, or governess-marries-Duke).

And all of them are about making The Unknown into The Known.

That's what "adventure" is -- going OUT into The Unknown, and learning it so it isn't unknown any more.

The Happily Ever After state of existence is more "Unknown" than "Here Be Dragons" ever was.  It is considered completely impossible.

The Paranormal Romance writer's job is to take the Reader on an adventure into a realm where the HEA is known, Normal, attainable, but perhaps at a cost, at a risk, with every high stakes.

A Magic using Detective - using paranormal powers to pry into affairs not his own (think about Apple refusing to hack into an Apple phone belonging to a deceased terrorist), is the perfect plot-vehicle to discuss how to discover and attain the HEA.

Does it take MAGIC to understand HAPPINESS?  Or do you, as a human, need to marry a River?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Green Death

Two articles in the September/October "Special 40th Anniversary" issue of DISCOVER magazine inspired this post. One, by Emily Anthes explains the emerging science of health care facility architecture.

We have always taken flowers and potted plants to our hospitalized loved ones, but how many of us have thought about the science behind our intuition? Patients feel less pain and recover faster, if they can look at Nature. Apparently, patients even do better if the wall art is of meadows, waterfalls, seascapes, treescapes et cetera instead of abstract art.

Nature is good for you. Are you good for Nature?

The opening premise of the second article, which is by Joan Meiners reminded me of "DUNE". In Dune, when a person dies, they bequeth all the water in their body to a beneficiary. Water is the most rare and precious treasure a person owns in the arid DUNE world.

Depending on age, size, and lifestyle, a human body is between 75% and 50% water.
https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/water-you-water-and-human-body?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects

The trouble with modern American burial customs is that the value of returning all that water and other nutrients to the soil is commonly, massively outweighed by the toxic --and even carcinogenic-- soup that is created by embalming.  Ms. Meiners reports on Troy Hottle's fascinating analysis of a a green death (with a positive carbon footprint of up to -864 kgs of Carbon Dioxide) and a not-green death (adding up to +350 kgs of Carbon Dioxide).

Green burials are explained here:
https://draxe.com/health/green-burial/

And here
https://www.georgiafuneralcare.com/funeral-services/green-burials

Apparently, someone who chooses to befriend the Earth in death can give life to a new tree, or provide free light to a park. (Columbia University's DeathLAB's Constellation Park.)

Much older societies provide free lunch to vultures, as explained in "Fifteen of the Strangest Funeral Customs from Around the World."
https://www.scoopwhoop.com/inothernews/strange-funeral-customs/

Of the fifteen in this article, one reminded me of the Arthurian legends of  Merlin being entombed (alive) by Morgan Le Fay (or by The Lady of the Lake) inside a tree (or a tower, or a rock or a cave).

For more inspiring information about Merlin
https://www.look4ward.co.uk/myths-amp-legends/walking-in-the-footsteps-of-legends-merlin-part-1/

Or
https://www.timelessmyths.com/arthurian/merlin.html

Or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin

Merlin legends are fascinating, and sometimes Gandalfian. There is also a reference to the cost of Magic. Most SFF writers know that there has to be a dark lining to every silvery cloud-of-power. In one version of the Merlin story, he can see the future for everyone else, but not for himself, and worse, his supernatural powers are diminished by lust, in fact his libido is his undoing... even the death of him.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

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

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Surviving the Slow Apocalypse

More about the "slow apocalypse" from Kameron Hurley this month:

Of Men and Monsters

Writing about police brutality, serial harassers in the SF field, incompetence and corruption in government, etc., she says, "Monsters masked as men have always walked among us." She deplores the difficulty of making broad structural changes, with the result that the same problems cycle around and continually resurface, "because we punish individuals instead of remaking systems." About the "monsters," she goes on to say, "What ensures their continued existence is the esteem we hold them in, the lifting up of powerful bullies out of fear: fear of retribution, fear of discomfort, fear of what would happen if we did not uphold the status quo." She focuses in particular on the "monsters" in the "professional spaces" of the science fiction community.

In connection with the protests, riots, and assassinations of the 1960s and early 1970s, she acknowledges, "There have always been times like these." Learning from the past is a necessary prerequisite for creating a better future.

Therefore, it strikes me as incongruous when, although she concludes with an expression of hope, immediately before that she declares, "It’s been difficult for me to write anything these days that isn’t prefaced with how difficult it is to do much of anything but survive during the final death throes of America as we know it."

Are things really THAT bad? I tend, rather, to accept Steven Pinker's thesis in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW that these are the best of times for our planet, not the worst. Yes, even now. What if COVID-19 had struck in the middle of the nineteenth century, before the germ theory of disease was accepted? Only sixty or seventy years ago, the deaths in police custody that have roused such passionate cries for change would hardly even have been considered newsworthy. Our country has survived worse, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two World Wars. As my stepmother used to say, much to my annoyance when I was a teenager impatient to grow up, "This too shall pass."

Speaking of writing, my personal coping mode is the opposite of Hurley's. I don't feel competent to deal with the weight of the present crises through fiction. In my last few works, as well as the WIP I'm starting now, I've practiced writing with a light touch and hints of humor that I hope will offer readers (along with myself) an hour or two of pleasurable escape.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-worldbuilding Integration Part 22 - Furnishing Your First Home

Theme-worldbuilding Integration

Part 22

Furnishing Your First Home 

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Posts are indexed at:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

Worldbuilding From Reality posts are indexed at:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

Our everyday world is spinning into a huge eruption of change.

The change in the way the world works may have a direction we have not yet identified.

Science Fiction is now famous for having spotted many trends and created many inventions, many IMPOSSIBLE things, that children who grew up reading those novels such as Heinlein's adventures for children then just went and invented because they didn't believe adults who said it was impossible to go to the Moon.

How do you find those trends?  How do you create a vision of the future, of life on far-away planets out of touch with Earth, of life in the asteroid belt?  What impossible things (other than a cure for the COVID-19 virus and its relative, the common cold) have to be invented and then deployed to children who grow up considering them commonplace?

Science Fiction writers missed the impact of the World Wide Web.  They got the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence, but not the direct-person-to-person social impact of the Web, or today Video-Conferencing.

They got the video-conferencing possibility, even in 3-D hologram, but not the social impact.

Mix Romance with Science Fiction and you follow the threads that begin to depict social impacts, the impact on families, on people living together, raising each others' children, and even working at a distance.

How do you find the key invention you can spring on the world, the impossible thing your Characters take for granted, and sketch out a future where the impact of that impossible thing is made clear? Is it a cautionary tale or a Wish Fulfillment Fantasy?

Think about the following quick reprise of prevailing trends of the last 70 to 100 years.  Follow these datapoint out another hundred years and look for the connecting links, the threads that embroider a theme.

https://www.facebook.com/david.lubkin
--------quote--------
It's striking how few products are durable now, compared to earlier times.

I just used a stapler I'd bought at seventeen for college. A bit of rust underneath but no hint that it won't last the rest of my life. Go back further, to the office furniture that's twenty or sixty years older still. Or the wood, stone, ceramic, or glass that might be in use centuries. In some cases, millennia.

The fragility now is sometimes mislabeled as planned obsolescence. That's not products that cease to work; that's products that still work but you're not satisfied with.

I'd say the fragility now is not unrelated though. If you can save a penny or a dime per unit in a VCR by using a plastic cog instead of metal, you do. Even though its failure will make the entire device unusable. Because by the time that happens, there'll be much better VCRs. Or people will be shedding their VCRs for DVD players.

And the sad truth of product sales—physical or software—is that people do not buy on the basis of quality. They might say they do. But they buy on features.

Time to market vs. features vs. price point vs. quality. Quality and durability are niche markets. *I* seek out quality, will wait for it, and will pay a premium price; most people aren't me.

-------end quote--------

And I replied to this post as follows:
https://www.facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg


------quote Jacqueline Lichtenberg--------

It is done that way on purpose.

However next to the durability list by decade, put a column of the total US (and world) population, then remember what people were saying about the population growth problem in the 1950's during the baby boom.

Next remember why the dollar price of a paperback book skyrocketed. Then remember the '50's transition to PLASTIC and the economic reasons for that. Note the total audience in the US for a TV show to be a success and get renewed.

Cross-correlate all those data points and memories with the population growth curve.

Then look at University course material in the Business and Accounting (even Law) majors, and your eyes will pop out at the discovery.

Then cross-correlate your discovery with a much-longer-range view of the History of Philosophy (from say 500 BC to today), then probe the course curriculum material for a major in Philosophy in 1950 compared to the content of those courses in 1990.

THEN you'll have a whole new understanding and a bunch of brand new questions about the nature of reality.

I could go on into particle physics, but check this list of data points before you delve into particle physics and astrophysics (my favorite topics, you know).

------end quote-----

Lin Bordwell noted there must be a special place in hell for Fox News. 

I replied to that because I was still revved up about the long-view data-point-set I had replied to David Lubkin with, about how the world has changed, what we see with our daily view eyes, and the hidden reasons behind the change we see.

The writer - especially of science fiction, but double-especially of Romance - needs to focus on those HIDDEN reasons, the hidden forces driving the apparent reality that people react to.

That is where THEME comes from. Theme is not intellectual in origin. It is GUT - pure, primal, survival instinct, and totally non-verbal.

But once you've isolated and refined that gut experience, the writer has to cast that understanding into a story that shares that experience with readers who have never had it, and may never have it.  People need to understand other people - and the easiest way to fill that need is to walk a mile in another's moccasins -- to become the viewpoint character in a story.

Here is my comment on Fox News and how it fits with the sweeping forces reshaping our children's and future grandchildren's world:

--------quote-------

Since the Fox founder resigned and then passed away, Fox's philosophy has become muddled, mixed, and there is no clear editorial policy right now except the fight for ratings. There's the problem with today's news organizations! I posted on David Lubkin's item about how products don't last these days:

------end quote------

I inserted a link to the comment I made to David Lubkin's post, then added:

--------quote-----

Relevant to why products don't last, Fox News (and all the national ones) are doing the same thing as manufacturers of products are doing, and they are doing it for exactly the same reasons. 

Tax Law is the core of the matter for writers -- which utterly changed the fiction writer's business model. Cj Cherryh summarized it beautifully, but I can't find her post on that. 

When News was actually NEWS, the "News Division" of a network was a loss-leader -- not intended to make money, but as a tax loss write-off and brownie-point audience winner. 

Bit by Bit tax law was changed, probably, for all I know, in footnotes and amendments to "must pass" headline bills voters don't read, so that networks and other outfits (like CNN), Indie outfits, MUST make a profit delivering news and weather. 

Advertising doesn't work the same way any more, either. 

But like FICTION, News audiences are the PRODUCT not the CUSTOMER.  Hence clickbait, rumor-mongering, emotion-whipping, opinion-shaping headlines - clickbait headlines - are the only way they can make money. So the competition has shifted from JUST THE FACTS FIRST - (the scoop) - to AIN'T IT AWFUL - (puff-piece).

-------end quote------

OK, if you've read all that, you're probably fuming and chomping at the bit about all the counter information you've got on tap. There are things you want to say.  Who wants to listen? 

That's how writers think, which is what my blogs here are about -- not about reality and not entirely about writing craft, per se, but about what a writer does inside their mind before they reach for craftsmanship tools and produce a product someone will pay for.

To write a story, you have to have something to say.  What you have to say, what you feel you must say, is your theme.

You've seen how scholars divide writers' output into phases or epochs.  Your theme can change as events impact your life, just events impact your Characters and cause them to "arc" as we highlighted in the series on the mysteries of pacing. 

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

You have a theme. Your work will hit commercial sales level when you let that theme show in your fiction.  That theme, uniquely yours, is personal but also universal, "the same but different" as they say in Hollywood. 

Writers have always striven to monetize an otherwise useless ability - the very common, maybe universal, ability to tell yourself stories. 

The difference between a writer and a non-writer is absolutely non-existent.

What differences you observe between writers and non-writers are not talent at all, but the determined, grim-faced, teeth-gritted, do-or-die acquisition of skills, craft, lore, expertise.  The craft to present your personal theme as a universal theme which the reader will experience as their own personal theme (because it's universal.)

One of the skills writers have to develop more robustly than non-writers is multi-tasking, learning to "integrate" two and more opposed, mutually exclusive, modes of thinking, and not let the reader see you doing it.

At first, all great writers suffer through producing awkward, flawed, ass-backwards arranged, incomprehensible manuscripts.  They aren't worthless.  They just need work - work that can't be done until the writer acquires the right tools.

One of those tools is the ability to build an artificial world around a Character who is suffering through a life-lesson, a karmic-backlash, or debt payoff, or getting his ass caught in a bear trap.

Those first, awkward, manuscripts have to be abandoned, decomposed, re-digested, then mined for the salient ingredients of theme.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/04/index-to-when-should-you-give-up-on.html

Theme is what a decorator does when furnishing a house, office, store, or TV Set -- or these days, a Zoom or Facebook Room, or whatever Google is running for conferences. All objects are chosen to illustrate a theme - a color palate.  Nothing is allowed in that does not fit the unifying theme - color, shape, texture, composition. 

A proper Zoom "meeting" set behind you (an artificial background) is your "world" built out of the "theme" your meeting is about.

Have you watched the sets of News Shows these days? Every couple years, they (for no explicable reason) remake the sets for news anchors.

Today, we know the views of streets or the artwork is just a projection on a big screen behind the News Anchor.  Fake sets. 

Likewise, a couple just at the "move in together" part of Romance has to build their world by furnishing their apartment or house.  Whose sofa gets sent to recycle?  Whose arm chair gets kept? What COLOR rugs, walls?

Moving-in is building a world.  It needs a theme if it is going to become permanent.  If the pieces don't go together, they will fly apart. Coherence of blended themes is key to the HEA.

What's your theme? 

Create a Zoom background that reflects your gut-theme in non-verbal symbolism.

Your first novel, or room-decor, is your first home, so furnish it with a unified theme that bespeaks the firm foundation of the Happily Ever After.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

"Publish And Be Damned" (Of Sensational Defamation)

Dishing the dirt does not always pay. Those who do not know History are doomed to repeat it.

"Publish and be damned," is believed to have been the first Duke of Wellington's response to literary blackmail. He was offered the opportunity to pay heftily to have a chapter about his extra-marital sexual exploits omitted from a tell-all series.

Brian Cathcart tells the scurrilous tale.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rear-window-when-wellington-said-publish-and-be-damned-the-field-marshal-and-the-scarlet-woman-1430412.html

Modern day legal bloggers, Patrick Considine,  Peter Bartlett, and Dean Levitan writing for Minter Ellison reflect on the current state of sensational defamation and suggest four lessons for publishers (media companies), following a major lawsuit which resulted in the largest defamation payout to a single person in Australian history.

See here:
https://www.minterellison.com/articles/four-lessons-for-media-companies-after-major-defamation-payout

So much for blackmail, and scurrilous scandal that may or may not be approximately accurate, at least as regards His Grace. It boggles the mind why writers of fiction would both "date" their work and expose themselves to the risk of a lawsuit by mentioning a living person, even a celebrity (known to have fewer rights in America) in an unflattering context.

Ron Charles, writing for The Washington Post reports on one such instance in particular, and several recent instances in general.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/alan-dershowitz-claims-the-good-wife-defamed-him-the-implications-for-fiction-writers-are-very-real/2020/08/05/703e7106-d699-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html

Ron's article is a jolly good read, with a nod and a wink to the Odyssey and to Shakespeare's Historical Plays, and also to Walt Disney's famous water fowl, an actor or two, and current and former politicians.

Talking of Hollywood, legal blogger Toni Oncidi for Proskauer Rose LLP notes that publishing Hollywood actors' full birth dates is perfectly acceptable.
https://calemploymentlawupdate.proskauer.com/2020/07/dark-day-for-hollywood-law-prohibiting-online-publication-of-actors-ages-is-struck-down/#page=1

In these days of rampant identity theft, it seems wrong to this writer that birthdays can be exploited against the wishes of the celebrity... but no doubt it's good for LifeLock. For those not being exploited and exposed by IMBD and its like, many of those "person-locator sites" are required by law to remove information upon request, but they don't make it easy to find out how.

Try reading all the way through Terms Of Use or Terms Of Service, or Contact Us, or Privacy Policy, and legitimately scurrilous sites will have an explanation of users' opt out rights.

Be watchful, also, about the information you provide for "two factor id" on sites such as Twitter.

According to legal blogger Jenny L. Colgate, writing for Rothwell Figg's Privacy Zone blog, Twitter has been exploiting that supposedly super private data and sharing it with advertisers.
https://www.theprivacylaw.com/2020/08/time-to-double-check-your-corporate-practices-twitters-use-of-personal-information-gathered-for-security-e-g-two-factor-id-fo

All the best,
Rowena Cherry 

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

PS. Apologies for the late "Publish". Thunderstorms, power cuts, loss of internet is the reason.

Monster Markers

A recent post on Quora asked, "What are the traits of ghosts in your culture?" Musing on that topic, I first thought of our familiar depiction of a ghost as a humanoid figure draped in a sheet. Now rather cartoonish, this image has inspired generations of children to wear sheets with cut-out eye holes as Halloween costumes. I assume that idea originated with the white shrouds in which corpses used to be buried. In A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Marley's ghost wears his burial garb, complete with a wrapper around the chin to keep his jaw closed. Otherwise, ghosts in the British and American tradition tend to look the same as they did in life. Hamlet's father appears "in his habit as he lived." We can tell they're ghosts only if they vanish before our eyes, walk through objects, or become transparent. In many legends, they display the wounds of violent death, perhaps carrying their severed heads if they died by beheading.

Other cultures have different concepts of spirit apparitions. Among the many categories of Chinese ghosts, some have "mouths like burning torches," "mouths no bigger than needles," or "hair like iron needles" (from Wikipedia, "Ghosts in Chinese Culture"). The supernatural status of beings like those would be hard to miss! There's a ghost in Bengal that takes the form of an owl and another that appears as a ball of fire like a will-o-the-wisp.

Japanese ghosts—yurei—typically have white clothing and black hair. They may be accompanied by floating flames of blue, green, or purple. Most often, they don't have feet. In anime, we can recognize a ghost by the fact that its bodily form fades to nothingness where the legs and feet should be.

In American popular culture, we have conventional ways of recognizing other kinds of supernatural beings. A character who never seems to eat, seldom or never appears in company during the day, and recoils from religious objects might be a vampire. If several unexplained "wild animal attacks" have occurred locally, the person who has hairs in his palms, eyebrows that meet over the nose, and/or two fingers of the same length (typically the index finger and the one next to it) is the logical suspect to be the werewolf, especially if he or she consistently disappears on nights of full moons. Sometimes a fiction author can use traits such as these as red herrings, to point readers toward a supposed vampire or werewolf while another character is the true villain or something altogether different is going on.

During the witch hunts of the early modern period, if a person suddenly fell ill or suffered the unexplained loss of valuable livestock or other property, accusing someone of malicious magic seemed the logical response. A remembered curse from a neighbor (usually a woman, most often one who was already disliked) shortly before the stroke of misfortune could lead to examining her for evidence of witchcraft, such as a suspicious mark on the body or the keeping of a pet that might be a demonic familiar in disguise. In fiction, these "proofs" might be reliable, some other character might be the real witch, or there might be no actual magic at work after all. When as a child I read Elizabeth George Speare's classic THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND, I was quite disappointed to find that there's no genuine witch in the story. The book is a realistic historical novel about accepting differences, and the titular character is a kindly widow ostracized because she's a Quaker.

In my recent story "Spooky Tutti Frutti," I expect readers to figure out the nature of the ghost long before the protagonist makes that discovery. The title includes an obvious hint, for one thing. The mysterious girl tends to disappear abruptly when the protagonist's back is turned, and she acts clueless about common features of contemporary life. I hope the readers will enjoy waiting for their suspicions to be confirmed.

Spooky Tutti Frutti

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reviews 56 - Winds of Wrath by Taylor Anderson

Reviews 56

Winds of Wrath

by

Taylor Anderson

Reviews haven't been indexed yet.

In Reviews 53, 54, and 55 we scrutinized three very differently structured Series, long-running Series in different  genres, none of them Romance Genre.

Reviews 53
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/reviews-53-fenmere-job-by-marshall-ryan.html

Reviews 54
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/reviews-54-resurgence-by-c-j-cherryh.html

Reviews 55
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/reviews-55-walking-shadows-by-faye.html

Note Gini Koch's ALIEN series
is not among these because it is Romance.  A romance reader striving to sell their own novels into the Romance genre can't really learn much new from reading perfect mixes of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance and Gaming -- which is what Gini Koch's ALIEN series is.

Here are 16 novels in the series listed in order on Amazon, rated as steamy paranormal romance, but that's not how I see it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074C6WPPK

And today we look at the structure and pacing of Winds of Wrath (June 2020 Book 15)  by Taylor Anderson, a wrap-up ending for his long-running Destroyermen Series (which I adore!).

There is a reason all these series are so long, other than that I love long series of large books.

Each of these series tells A story - one-long-continuous-story.  Each is "the story of" something very different from the others.  They make a set to contrast/compare and learn from.

The Destroyermen series features a wondrous lesson in THE EXPOSITORY LUMP,

C. J. Cherryh's exposition style in the Foreigner Series

makes an informative contrast too Destroyermen.  Cherryh's exposition recounts the Situation and Relationships begun in previous books and advanced just a tiny bit in the current book.  As the series progresses, the expository train becomes larger than the current novel's advancement.  Some fans are losing patience with the apparently static pacing of the series.

The Destroyermen also has a long-long expository trail of the things the Characters did and what happened because of it in previous books.  But in this current book, the explosive (literally, as it is a war-story) pacing carries the plot and story to CONCLUSION.

War is a tedious thing to live through.  "Hurry up and Wait" is the mantra of the soldier being moved about on a worldwide chessboard by Generals who don't know their names.

And that has been the pacing core of the Destroyermen Series - hurry up and wait.  The developments flash across the page at a dizzying rate, then slow to a creep for pages and pages.

Anderson usually moves some characters through action, great battle scenes, and long-range maneuvers, then jumps to another set of characters on a different side of the World War, on a different continent.

The astute reader (and student of our World Wars) will recognize the structure.  It is a World War.

To keep his readers fascinated, Anderson inserts long, detailed descriptions of the ordnance development, of the science and inventiveness of the natives of his invented world.  It is description, all static exposition, tedious as war itself, but precisely based on the developmental stages this world went through during World Wars.

War spurs industry, creativity, invention.  The non-humans of this parallel world at war learn fast and prevail by creativity alone.

Here, in the final book of this story, survival depends entirely on creativity, on guts, and on freehand invention of strategy and tactics by a total amateur, the Captain of a Destroyer whipped from World War II Earth's South Pacific and plunged into a parallel Earth's war for survival.

The Alternative History creation is superb, the imagination fabulous, and the characters engaging

But it's the pacing you should focus on.

Here is the index to the entries on Pacing.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

If you want a Character to do an "about-face" in life-direction, to change from "I'll never get married" to "Will you marry me" -- you need more space than just one novel.

Gini Koch's Alien is susceptible to the marriage idea at the beginning, before they meet and become irrevocably entangled.

Other soldiers of fortune types are resistant, as resistant as guys who believe there can never been any such thing as Happily Ever After.

To change such a Character's ideas about Love and Romance, you need TIME and SPACE for him to arc.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/05/theme-story-integration-part-5-how-to.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Giving A Shit. Or Not. (Of Word Choices, Word Order, And Grammar.)

Grammar, word choice, and punctuation are a matter of courtesy. Poets and Yoda may turn sentences around, but the meaning is clear. Rules are still followed.  If fictional, green, space aliens can make sense, shouldn't the rest of us?

Perhaps the courtesy bit is being taken too far. Clarity of meaning might be more important... unless the intention is deliberately to mislead.

How about this: "...beleaguered Name-Your-State governor XYZ".  Does that headline tell you if it was the State or the Governor that is beleaguered? No. Does it matter? Yes. It would be easy to change the word order, and much more courteous of the journalist and his/her/their editor.

I have a German friend who says "I give a shit for U," when he means that his emotional investment in "U" is the lowest possible.  There is nothing lower than a bowel movement, right?

Or is being given  "nothing at all, not even a bowel movement" even less respect?

An English friend would say "I don't give a shit for 'U'" meaning that even the most disrespectful action is more attention and time than he is willing to accord to  'U',  whomsoever or whatever 'U' stands for.

Kenneth Beare's article for thoughtco.com on the differences between American and British English as regards grammar, spelling, and word choice is succinct and interesting, especially regarding the simple past and present perfect.

https://www.thoughtco.com/differences-between-american-and-british-english-1212216

Leo McKinstry for the British Daily Mail penned a jolly good piece about Political Correctness and word choice. Apparently, the populace of Great Britain is assumed --by the elites-- to have the vocabulary and understanding of a five-year old, and therefore, because one five-year-old assumed that the reflective devices embedded in roads to mark the lanes at night are feline body parts, "cats' eyes" must now be called "road studs".

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5094791/A-Z-politically-correct-madness.html

How long will it be before itinerant gigolos decide that "road studs" is an offensive term?

How much will language be impoverished, not to mention the resources for humorists, wits, and stand up comedians, if vocabulary is whittled away? Beyond "man holes" and "man power", there is some discussion on the authors' forms about whether or not "master" should be banned as a word. Alas for master sergeants, master plumbers, master suites, mastery of a subject, masters degrees and even homophones (words sounding like "master-", such as that immensely popular puerile joke about Master Bates). 

Is etymology not taught in English classes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly

https://www.etymonline.com/

How can grammar be racist?  Or sexist? Every country or state that has a national language, has rules of grammar. Without grammar, one cannot be understood. Therefore, grammar and the importance of choosing "le mot juste" should be taught more, not less. Some would claim that this was the actual point being made by the Rutgers academic... although it was widely reported as "Teaching Grammar is Racist!"

There is an advertisement by a pharma business that lays down the law: I may not urinate without consulting my physician. Really?

Try really listening to advertisements. Why is it, in America, that the FCC allows them to bombard all of us, daily and even hourly, with execrable grammar and muddled messages? It is our fault if we don't understand what they mean.

According to the Lanham Act, as long as a claim is not "literally false", but rather, remains ambiguous, the advertiser is reasonably safe. 

The legal bloggers of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP give insights into the sorts of marketing trickery that goes on, and what is allowed versus what crosses the line.

https://www.dwt.com/insights/2020/07/stay-advised-whats-new-this-week-july-27

Moreover, if you ever listened to advertisements promoting health supplements, medicines, beauty or medical devices and equipment, you might have wondered whether they damn themselves with faint praise by claiming to be FDA "cleared", when other offerings announce that they are FDA "registered" or FDA "approved".  High risk devices are required to be "approved".  Problems for the consumer may arise when medical devices are purchased from foreigners. Foreign devices do not have to be FDA registered, even if they are high risk.

Aspen Laser explains:
https://www.aspenlaser.com/the-difference-between-fda-registered-fda-approved-and-fda-cleared/

Finally, if you care about copyright, and if a State, or state entity --such as a school or library or prison or tourism board or university etc-- has ripped off your copyrighted work, the Copyright Office wants to hear from you.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/copyrightinfringement


All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

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

Dislikable Characters

What does it take to turn you off fictional characters so thoroughly you don't want to read about them? Even if I dislike some aspects of a protagonist, that's not necessarily a downcheck for the story as a whole if it engages me otherwise. Scarlett O'Hara is far from a nice person, yet I sympathize with her despite her flaws and have reread GONE WITH THE WIND many times. Any character who constantly and indiscriminately peppers his or her conversation with words formerly called "unprintable" (as opposed to using them for emphasis when the situation justifies them) repels me. I detest this habit in Stephen King's early novels, but I find those works so fascinating in general that I put up with the annoyance.

I just finished reading a well-written, emotionally credible ghost story in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. The protagonist, a middle-aged divorced man, sees not only the ghosts of his parents but "wraiths of the living" in the form of apparitions of his ex-wife and their son. The man's unhappiness and his increasing estrangement from the people around him make the story painfully depressing to read, although still effective in its way. The character loses my sympathy, however, when he collects his mother's personal effects from the nursing home and decides to throw away the family photograph.

One of my favorite mystery authors, best known for her dog-themed mysteries, also collaborated on a food-themed detective series. I was so disappointed in the first novel that I never gave the sequels a chance. Two reasons: The protagonist, a young, single woman, inherits money from a relative on condition that she go to graduate school. Instead of rejoicing in the opportunity, she chooses a major, not on the basis of interest—she has no apparent interest in furthering her education in any field—but on the principle of taking the easiest subject she can find in order to get the money. Also, while preparing for a first date with a man she hasn't even met yet, she seriously considers having sex with him. That strikes me as so dumb I couldn't believe in the character, much less like her. Those personal aversions of mine might not even register on the mental radar of a different reader.

Characters who display consistently negative reactions to situations and people turn me off. If the viewpoint character constantly spouts snarky insults, whether aloud or through internal monologue, the writer may intend for the reader to admire her clever wit and sympathize with her grievances. I react, instead, by assuming that if the character dislikes or disdains everybody and everything, there's something wrong with him or her, not with the other people. I once read a horror story about which I recall very little except that it began with the middle-aged, male protagonist lingering over late-night TV to avoid sex with his wife, who had recently developed a renewed zest for it. That glimpse into his mind was enough to make me loathe the character.

I don't mind reading a short story or possibly a novella focused on an unlikable protagonist, if the work has other virtues to hold my attention. I refuse to endure a whole book with such a character, though, unless the story exerts an irresistible fascination for some other reason. For instance, a certain bestselling series about a solitary, embittered man swept into an epic fantasy realm was a very hard sell for me; the protagonist struck me as so unpleasant and depressing that only the strength of the worldbuilding prevented me from giving up on him.

For me to willingly spend an entire novel, trilogy, or series in the mind of a person I would avoid in real life, the work needs to have other enthralling qualities to make up for the unpleasantness. Where do you draw the line with unlikable characters?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mysteries of Pacing Part 10 - Show Don't Tell Character Arc

Mysteries of Pacing

Part 10

Show Don't Tell Character Arc 

Previous parts of Mysteries of Pacing are indexed at:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

Note in that index post, at the top there are links to 3 of my Reviews of Series I've been following on this blog.  Assuming you have at least looked over the cover blurbs and first and last chapters of some of the novels in each Series, think now about the Main Character in each series.

If you don't like the Series I've highlighted, pick some others you do like.  The point here is to follow a single Character through years, and even decades, of life's vicissitudes and rewards.

I'm also assuming, if you've had the ambition to write novels for a while, you've also delved into a large number of biographies, both of famous people and of less well known who have lived through major world events (such as the World Wars, famine in Africa, adventures with the Peace Corps, etc.).

https://socreate.it/en/blogs/socreate-blog/posts/how-to-write-character-arcs/


Many people have lived interesting lives without making Headlines you can rip a story, plot, or setting out of.

Given that breadth of reading experience, and the ambition to write something as gripping and fascinating (maybe even instructive) as those books you love, consider the story you want to tell.

Now reconsider whether any of the books you have read actually TELL you a story.

If you're using the examples I've highlighted in Reviews, the answer is, "No, they don't tell the story."

The deepest, most gripping, thrilling, and informative books (novels and non-fictiion) SHOW you the story in such a way that you remember it as telling you the story.

The serious clue to what is happening when you remember a good book comes to you when you meet the author of that book and get into a conversation, not so much about the book but about life in general.

You come to realize one of the oldest bromides in the writing profession -- "The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote."

And the reason for that difference is the element in worldbuilding we've discussed at such length, Verisimilitude.

Making your world, your characters, your story into something resembling the reader's internal world (derived from but not identical to the real world around her) gives the illusion of verisimilitude because we all believe our own internal world is real, or very close to reality.

Verisimilitude is not about reality, but about resembling reality closely enough to "suspend disbelief" long enough to explore the validity of one's beliefs, to see reality from a perspective unavailable without suspension of disbelief.

One of the writer's tools for creating Verisimilitude in a Character, especially a Main Character, or Viewpoint Character whose story you reveal in the plot of his life-experiences, is Dialogue.

Characterization of a Viewpoint Character, one whose silent thoughts and reasoning, emotional reactions and subsequent evaluations, are revealed to the reader, requires that the Character's dialogue, words spoken aloud, be reflective of that Character's Arc.

As we discussed in Part 9, Character Arc is a vector quantity, having both magnitude and direction.  That makes it complicated, but extraordinarily simple to portray.

Here is a blog describing (as most writing tutorials do) what the ultimate goal of your crafting of a story should be -- but devoid (as most writing tutorials are) of exactly how to take your inner vision and make it into words other people will enjoy.  Nevertheless, if you're confused about what the goal is, read this

https://socreate.it/en/blogs/socreate-blog/posts/how-to-write-character-arcs/


Here are a few posts exploring creation of Verisimilitude:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-1.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/06/depiction-part-14-depicting-cultural.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/10/alien-sexuality-part-3-corporate-greed_25.html

And here's the index post for the series on Dialogue which now has 15 entries.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/10/dialogue-parts-1-4-listed.html

Dialogue is not real-speech-transcribed.  Characters don't speak like real people.  Dialogue is an art form designed to move the plot while incidentally leading the reader (or viewer) to create their own Character from the words spoken.

Dialogue is "Di" -- that is, two-fold, an interchange between at least two.  One might be an Alien, a Computer, a Pet animal, a working animal (the Cowboy's horse), and the speaking Character may infer or imagine the responses to suit himself.

Robert Heinlein famously characterized Mike, the Artificial Intelligence awakened on Earth's Moon whose job was to run the infrastructure of the habitation there.

Dialogue, likewise, must not be Exposition.  Exposition is the writer filling the reader in on "need to know" matters the Characters already know.

Beginning writers often use the line "As you know, ..." and proceed to insert Exposition into the spoken words of the Character.  This never works well because it stops the forward momentum (Pacing) of the plot developments.

In a Mystery, for example, you can show-don't-tell a Character lying by using Dialogue to relate an Event the Narrative went through step by step.  Describing that Event to another Character, but leaving out or inserting information can move the plot forward.

There are many other exceptions, but wherever you find yourself using Dialogue to explain something to the Reader, re-write it into plain Exposition. Then you can mine the Expository Lump for salient bits, sprinkle them elsewhere in Dialogue, and delete the fabricated lump.

Description, Dialogue, Exposition, Narrative, are the basic tools of the story teller.  Each has a purpose, and when used for that purpose, each one can be crafted into a method of advancing the plot.

The plot is the sequence of Events that happen TO the Main Character, impacting the Character's character, thus propelling the Main Character along an Arc.  Some Events hit hard and speed the Character to new Realizations that change the Character's decisions, thus affecting the plot-arc.  Some Events change the DIRECTION the Main Character is going in Life.

This year, 2020, we are striving to "get back to normal."  This concept "get back to normal" is an attempt to retain the DIRECTION our lives were going in while compensating for the speed-bump of quarantine which slowed down, delayed, and frustrated us.  Our life-Arc changed speed and now we struggle to keep direction.

Think about the world around you and find the "Arc" to understand how to craft a novel using Character Arc.

For a Character to "Arc" - the Character's life (inner and outer life) has to be in flux.  Finding where your Character's "novel" happens along that Character's life-path is one of the hardest techniques to learn. Romance is easy in that the novel happens between first meeting and happily-ever-after. Science Fiction is much harder, but generally the novel happens from before-the-Protagonist-knows to after-the-Protagonist-finds-out.  Science is the never-ending quest to figure the universe out.

Usually, we start a novel where two forces that will Conflict first meet, intersect, become aware of each other, or just plain collide.  Each of those forces are represented by a Character, and that Character (two Lovers-to-be or Hero and Villain) will CHANGE under the impact of the meeting.

Yes, both Hero and Villain, or both Lovers, have to change.

Romance is, as I've noted many times, something that happens in Reality under the impact of a Neptune Transit to the Lover's Natal Chart.  Neptune's effect is to blur, dissolve, erode, or confuse, mislead.

Neptune is also called Wisdom.  Neptune is about a method of cognition which is not logical, a data channel which streams information into the deepest part of the Psyche.

Neptune, Romance, doesn't usually cause Change or Arc in your character or life-direction.  It is other things going on while Neptune prevails that cause serious change of direction.

If such other direction-changing forces are acting on a Character, Neptune will move through and ease, smooth, lubricate the path of Change.

Romance makes falling in Love easy.  Without Neptune, falling in love can be a disaster because people resist the kind of change it takes to blend an innermost soul with another.

If a Main Character, Protagonist, Hero, is to undergo such a profound change of innermost character, how can a writer Depict that change without inserting long, boring, exposition lifted from Psychology Textbooks?

Here is the index to Depiction:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/index-to-depiction-series-by-jacqueline.html

Dialogue is one of the most powerful tools for depicting a Character, with one caveat -- avoid trying to spell out an accent or dialect.

You can use spelled accents the first few times a Main Character encounters the Character who talks funny, but let the Main Character's "ear" become gradually accustomed to the dialect, and fade in a correct spelling, leaving only the rhythm and vocabulary of the accent.

And you can use that same technique with choice of vocabulary. You've seen it done (not really well) on Star Trek where Spock uses "big words" (even small ones may be obscure).  His dialogue is not laced with scientific jargon, but with precise English dictionary words where colloquialisms serve native speakers well.

In lieu of spelling out accented speech, a dialect or non-native-speaker, try altering choice of vocabulary, or phrasing.

Note how many older people use slang, old sayings, cliche or pop culture references from their teens and twenties, decades previous.  Note how today's young people have a whole new vocabulary, and new celebrities and movies to quote.

As an aspiring writer, you probably love words, and have a junk-pile of trivia in mind of words nobody uses much.

Find the etymology of words, old and new (easy using Google and Urban Dictionaries etc), and you will find the backstory of your Main Character depicted in the vocabulary of their youth.

Start the story with the Main Character's dialogue redolent of that epoch, and let the impact of a younger person's speech infect the older, let them discuss current events using non-current vocabulary.

Trying to explain the usage, connotation and denotation of unfamiliar words can be a Lover's Pillowtalk Device.

Love is about communication.  Use vocabulary to depict Character, and Character Arc as one absorbs the speech idiosyncrasies of another.

For example, one protagonist may start out hiding from emotional confrontations by sprinkling speech with "bromides."

Even if you know what a bromide is, and often use them yourself, Google "the bromide."  Check some of the "dictionaries" that come up and compare the entries -- they aren't all the same, and make wonderful ongoing conversational tag-games for Characters engaged in something more important.

A "bromide" can be identified as "...a comment that is intended to calm someone down when they are angry, but that has been expressed so often that it has become boring and meaningless."  This evolved from the wide usage of bromide compounds as sedatives.

The evolution of language describes a Culture Arc, which can be one of the Mysteries of Pacing, as one Character acclimates to an Alien culture.

See https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/bromide  - and note the tabs at the top of the page that separate slanted definitions.

Over the course of your Series of Novels, let the Characters absorb each others speech patterns, whether it surfaces as on-the-nose discussion of words, usage and meaning, or as is more congruent with verisimilitude, just unconsciously imitate each other.

That's how we learn language, imitating.

Try doing a scene where a younger Character learns some word-usage, or a "bromide" saying, from an old TV series (like Perry Mason in B&W), from an older Character who uses such a phrase naturally.

The reader may absorb lessons in appreciating language and its accurate usage, while the Characters you are depicting learn how much they mean to each other.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Privacy Con

Whether "Con" is short-speak for "convention" or "confidence (not)", tricks with regard to ones identity, privacy, copyrights, and biometric data abound. Privacy cons are this week's theme.

Sharing Key Takeaways from the FTC's PrivacyCon, legal bloggers Lauren Kitces,  Marisol Mork,  Kristin Bryan, and  Dylan J. Yepez for Squire Patton Boggs, report on the five important privacy topics discussed at the fifth such annual event.

The six topics were Artificial Intelligence, Health Apps, Internet-of-Things, Privacy and Security related to virtual assistants and digital cameras, International privacy, and miscellaneous privacy and security issues. The Key Takeaways are an excellent summary.

Original Link:
https://www.securityprivacybytes.com/2020/07/key-takeaways-from-the-ftcs-privacycon/#page=1

Lexology Link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=776efd4d-2207-49dd-b38b-09ee817a1a12

As regards Health Apps, it is important to read up on recent news from FitBit, and to have confidence that FitBit promises that the acquiring advertisement company will respect users' medical privacy and will not use FitBit users' health and wellness data for one brand of advertising.

Chaim Gartenberg reports for The Verge:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/1/20943318/google-fitbit-acquisition-fitness-tracker-announcement

The Trichordist writes at length about the Internet-of-Things, wittily terming it the Internet of other people's Things, because of the massive amount of copyright infringement online.

This link is to Part 4 of a multi-series set of articles based on the amici curiae SCOTUS filing in what the authors claim might be the most important copyright case of the decade, because it might set fair use standards for years to come: 
https://thetrichordist.com/2020/07/30/there-are-untold-riches-in-running-the-internet-of-other-peoples-things-supreme-court-brief-of-davidclowery-helienne-theblakemorgan-and-sgawrites-in-google-v-oracle-part-4/

While on the topic of copyright, Chris Castle explains that copyright infringement lowers "the customary price", or what consumers would pay to read the book or dance to the music if not for its availability free on the copyright infringing sites.

If you use TIKTOK, do you know that they are allegedly a pirate site and allegedly don't pay for the music?

https://musictechpolicy.com/2020/08/01/when-pigs-fly-the-tiktok-fire-sale-belly-flop/

One wonders, does Apple know?  Tiktok icons pop up in the app store. It would be good to have the Supreme Court rule on what is fair use and what is not!

Returning to the legal blogs, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP takes a look at Facebook and its use and possible abuse of biometric identifiers.

Lexology link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3b349823-41a3-4852-b115-8e8d8a7e0196

Original link:
https://www.huntonprivacyblog.com/2020/07/29/texas-ag-investigates-facebooks-use-of-biometric-identifiers/#page=1

One should be wary about giving consent when banks and brokerage houses try to bully one (usually via the artificially intelligent receptionist before one gets through to a real banker or broker) into agreeing to have ones voice recorded to use as identification for the future. It's becoming increasingly tricky to have confidence that ones voice isn't recorded and used for that purpose regardless of ones wishes.

What happens if one catches cold? Would ones voice pass muster? What if one of the places storing ones voice were to be hacked. If it is already unwise to say, "Yes" to any stranger on the telephone, how much more dangerous to ones privacy and ones property would it be if biometric data is widely used for identification and security?!

Finally, for Baker and Hostetler LLP, legal bloggers Linda A. Goldstein and Amy Ralph Mudge discuss a social media bot dossier. Allegedly, this is about a company called Devumi, that was accused of selling the appearance of thousands of fake social media fans to boost the reputations and egos of persons wishing to appear influential or popular, especially on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Original link:
https://e.bakerlaw.com/rv/ff00664060d9cac92f4e13993c479c667c08f540/p=8416417

Lexology link:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=43f3ee0e-0148-49b2-a69e-f651527d6e2f

Back in 2018, Jesse M. Brody of Manatt Phelps and Phillips wrote about fake social media follower bots, apparently belonging to the same company, and presumably how these false friends con advertisers.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=f2f48e9a-4ba4-4d13-852a-16e3020d80de

One can only imagine!

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

Shadow of the Beast

My first published novel, SHADOW OF THE BEAST, a werewolf urban fantasy with romantic elements, is back in print after a few years of dormancy, being recently re-released by Writers Exchange E-Publishing:

Shadow of the Beast

This wasn't the first novel I completed. That was the true book of my heart, vampire romantic urban fantasy DARK CHANGELING, first published not long after SHADOW OF THE BEAST and currently available in an e-book duology called TWILIGHT'S CHANGELINGS:

Twilight's Changelings

And as a Kindle e-book here:

Amazon Page

SHADOW OF THE BEAST was originally published by a small horror press that produced numerous attractive trade paperbacks for several years before closing down. My novel was later picked up by Amber Quill Press, which had a fairly long run before it, too, went out of business. I was lucky to find Writers Exchange, which sells its products in both electronic and trade paperback formats, to adopt most of my Amber Quill books. (It's somewhat disheartening to contemplate how many of my works have been "orphaned" by the disappearances of publishers over the years. Fortunately, we now have self-publishing as an alternative in case switching to a new publisher doesn't work out.)

I lightly revised SHADOW OF THE BEAST before the Amber Quill edition was published. The text of this latest version hasn't changed from that one; only the cover is different. The story follows the template of one of my favorite tropes, the Ugly Duckling. The heroine discovers she isn't what she always believed herself to be, and traits that first seem like flaws turn out to be gifts. I've retold that basic story multiple times over the years. My first professionally published work of fiction, "Her Own Blood" in FREE AMAZONS OF DARKOVER, fits that pattern, as does DARK CHANGELING.

Because SHADOW OF THE BEAST retains the text from the previous edition, it features technology that has become obsolete. Since only one scene is affected (where the characters use a VHS camcorder and tape player), the editor decided it wouldn't be a problem and didn't need a disclaimer at the beginning. As far as the plot goes, SHADOW OF THE BEAST has some undeniable flaws. The editing for Amber Quill corrected some of the original version's problems but didn't amount to a major rewrite. The "because line" is weak in places; back then, I didn't realize I was sometimes making characters do things for my convenience as author, rather than from solidly established motives. I've learned better since then, I hope!

What's your philosophy on rewriting older books for re-release or leaving them alone?"

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Mysteries of Pacing Part 9 - Character Arc Pacing Using The Foible

Mysteries of Pacing

Part 9

Character Arc Pacing Using The Foible

Previous entries in this series are indexed at:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/07/index-to-mysteries-of-pacing.html

People make mistakes.

So, therefore, a Character in a story who makes a mistake (thus advancing the plot, NOT delaying it), is entirely plausible, sometimes lovable, easily identified with, and a true candidate for Husband of the Year -- eventually -- when that mistake arises from a foible.

See the entry on What Does She See In Him
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

It is the core of the HEA plausibility study we've been doing. How does one human assess another's Character?  How inflexible is that human in changing the criteria by which Character is to be assessed?  How important is Character in a Romance?  Does a Romance need two sterling Characters to progress to an HEA?

Does Happily Ever After ending plausibility depend entirely on two Characters having internal strength of character?

What is character, exactly? What constitutes "strength" in Character?  Can one strong Character be the Soul Mate of another Strong Character, or does a Strong Character require a Weak Character Mate?

All these questions have one valid answer.

"Probably."

Somewhere, some-when, on some fantasy timeline, each of those questions has a yes, and each has a no, and where there is a sliding scale (how important?) every single value on that whole scale, plus-to-minus, works perfectly in some alternate universe.

Your job as a writer is to take your reader on a journey across the border between here and now and there and then, and insert your reader into the head of a native of that otherwhere.

At the end of the story, the reader should return to reality with a new METHOD of assessing data about the nature and value of a person, maybe about what constitutes person-hood.

To be the tour-guide into that otherwhere, the writer has to create that otherwhere, and all its non-human Characters, if not from scratch, from a template.

The best template to use to create a fictional World is one of the many your target readership already knows.

See the following Index lists for posts on these intertwined and related topics on Worldbuilding, Theme, and integrating theme and setting ( where setting = world).

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/08/index-to-posts-about-using-real-world.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/12/index-to-theme-plot-character.html

Actually, "Setting" is a tiny slice of a "World" - but to write science fiction, the writer needs a sketch of the whole world around the Characters.

To end up with a Science Fiction Romance novel, you start by envisioning (not necessarily building in detail) the World the Characters must cope with.

The one decisive element the writer needs to know to avoid endless rewriting is what-and-where the imaginary world diverges from the reader's reality (or the reader's notion of reality).

What your reader KNOWS is key to targeting a readership.  Publishing mostly regards assumptions about the reader's pre-existing knowledge base as the key to deciding the label to put on the book, Children's, Juvenile, Adult, Cozy, Chicklit, etc.

Readerships are regarded as divided by age, and thus "life-experience" -- and aspirations.  "When I grow up, I want to be  ... " or, "I want my newborn grandson to grow up to be ..."

What the reader will learn from the book depends on how old that reader is, or alternatively what their live-experience is.  For example, the children growing up in a war-torn region of the globe will be fully Adult at maybe 10 or 12, maybe having shot and killed an attacker, or an enemy who isn't attacking (yet).

Maybe that child learns hate, and grows up to un-learn it, as so very many things learned in childhood are discarded in the twenties.

Alternatively, the majority of Romance readers probably are growing up in sheltered homes, being pushed through schooling they don't want (yet), and having their lives planned by their grandparents.

These readerships have overlap points, but Publishers still prefer to divide humanity by age.

See these posts on Targeting a Readership:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/10/index-to-targeting-readership-series-by.html

So your job as a Science Fiction Romance Writer is to be the tour guide to a gaggle of tourists of mixed backgrounds all arriving in your world with different expectations.

As in the film AVATAR,
https://www.amazon.com/Avatar-Sam-Worthington/dp/B00AVF8USS/
you have to give each of the tourists in your gaggle a persona, an avatar, inside which they can safely tour your world, and still bond with and empathize with the issues at hand.

The cultural rejection of the HEA as inevitable, or even possible, may reside in the scarcity of Avatars tailored for the segment of the readership that flat disbelieves.

Your job is to usher them into a world where things are different than their current reality, where the singular difference makes the HEA possible, or even very likely.

For the firmly convinced anti-HEA (maybe amenable to the HFNow ending), the transition in belief system is truly gigantic.

It is existential.

It is a transition that threatens the very foundations of conceptual reality.  Change in such fundamental beliefs can feel like being suddenly plunged into a nightmare.

In other words, for some people a realistic Romance Novel is actually Horror Genre.

To ease such a reader into your World, you need a Character to be their Avatar.

To deliver a satisfying good read, you need that Avatar to Arc from where the Reader is in their life at that time, to where the Reader can envision a world where SOMETHING is different than in her real world, and that difference makes the HEA either possible or inevitable.

The place in "life" and the parameter of reality blocking the reader's life progress, are items you glean from your view of the world (yes, rip this from the current headlines).

To build your fictional world, a simplified, stripped down, version of Reality, you target a problem in real Reality, and figure what about that target has to change (and into what it must change) to cause the HEA to be the normal life-arc of the characters in your world.

To make rabbit stew, first catch your rabbit.

In this case the rabbit is the problem making people frustrated or miserable, or maybe excited and ready to leap into adventure, never mind the danger.  The stew is your theme.

Identify the problem, hypothesize a solution, run an experiment.

The essence of science fiction is encapsulated in three question formats:  "What if ...?" " "If only ..." and "If this goes  on ..."

Focus on that, and you find it applies perfectly to Romance.  These are not two separate genres, as publishers still believe, and when you use both in a single novel or series, you aren't "mixing" genres, but rather revealing the hard-core practical reality at the center of your World.

The mystery of pacing is likewise revealed by what you choose as your hard-core, practical, inescapable attribute of reality that is so very different from what your reader thinks reality revolves around.

Consider, maybe our individual (and collective) "view of reality" is somewhat like a Galaxy -- with a black hole in the center, and our beliefs like a spiral scattering of stars being pulled down that drain just like water sucked down a drain by gravity.

It's the inexorable gravity of the black hole that gives spiral galaxies their shape.

Study your black hole.  Study your reader's black hole.  Measure the distance between them, and consider if one passes through the other at an angle, what "beliefs" (e.g. stars) will be changed in orbit, or possibly gather substance or planets?

The belief system of a person can be reshaped by an encounter with a black hole from another system of belief.

One won't be turned into the other, but there will be a morphing into something else.

Nothing remains unaffected by such major encounters.

Reading a novel can be a view through a telescope, or a close encounter, or an interpenetration.

The interpenetration happens when the Main Character of the story is an amenable Avatar for the reader who then experiences not just the story, but the arc of the Character.

The reader's real, personal, character will arc in response just as two galaxies passing through each other leave change in both.

The pacing the writer needs to pull off this non-destructive but morphing encounter depends on the initial distance between the core beliefs of the reader and the core beliefs of the Avatar, the main character to whom the plot happens.

A core belief is like that black hole that shapes the position and vector of each of the suns in the galaxy spiral.  A core belief shapes and determines the direction of change of all the other beliefs.  Beliefs are not static, and they have gravity of their own, and pull planetary beliefs into orbit, all forever moving through reality, each shaping space around it.

Dynamic motion.

Beliefs are not static things.  They arc.  They arc around a central gravity-point like that black hole, and they become organized through life into recognizable shapes.

An interpenetration with another character can add, subtract, and re-organize the substance of the beliefs, or rip them away sending them off into the deep.  Romance can do that to a Character - just reshape reality.

In dramatic writing, "pacing" is the rate of change of Situation.  It can also be the rate of change of the Character's understanding of what the Situation really is.

In other words, pacing can be increased or slowed by the rate at which a Character learns either information or a method of interpreting information.  Having to pause to re-interpret everything that's happened so far can slow pacing.

Pacing is a vector.  It has both direction and speed.

Once you've lured or seduced your reader into occupying the Avatar character, you can manipulate the Avatar's understanding of your World.

The best way to captivate and show-don't-tell is to start your Avatar out at a point where his/her beliefs match orbit with your reader.  Then send a challenge of current beliefs flying at your Avatar knocking him out of orbit.

Like billiards.  

It is what happens when two Soul Mates meet.  The core beliefs of each, the black hole at the center of Soul, is knocked, deformed, and rung like a bell.

The Love At First Sight Romance is a direct collision of the black holes at the centers of your pair of Characters.  It sets the whole galaxy of belief system of each of them ringing like a bell.

Each of the Characters must arc, or change their beliefs to accommodate the new gravity pattern around their central, core belief.

In a Romance, the core beliefs either don't have very far to go, or if they have far to go, they change in very tiny increments, very slowly, which takes an entire Series of novels, a long series, 20 books or more sometimes.

Pacing, in drama, is a vector quantity.  It has speed and direction.

If you have to change your Character's direction in life, by a lot, do it slowly.

Science Fiction Romance is one genre that, in a Series, allows your plot to be fast-paced while your story (Romance) is slow-paced enough to have verisimilitude.

Using the definition of Plot as the sequence of events caused by the Main Character's initial action, each event causing the next, you can start the series where the Main Character, the Avatar, makes a mistake.

However, it can't be just a random mistake.  The Avatar's action has to be an illustration of an innate foible, a character flaw, that throughout the coming series of novels, will be hammered to destruction, the source revealed, and the remedy encountered, resisted, then accepted.

The HEA, in real life, is usually the result of such a developmental arc, where events cause self-examination and reassessment, gradually (over years) revealing and eliminating a foible.

Some foibles are not worth the effort to eliminate -- they just make the person individualistic, one of a kind, charming, interesting or just a character.

Other foibles can cripple a person's life, preventing career advancement, diverting energy to unproductive channels, and just being mistakes to regret.

The foible is the key ingredient in a Character formulation, in Characterization, that allows that Character to be the Main Character and the reader's Avatar.

Look up foible (Google it) and study the word and its ever changing meaning.  Identify your own foibles, which you still have and which you've vanquished.  Think about how the vanquished ones were knocked out of you.

Identify that pattern of foible-remediation in other people you know, and then maybe on Facebook Friends postings.

Find some headlines about people undergoing remediation of their foibles.

Find the foible pattern common to humanity, and build your Aliens around a different pattern.

The Aliens will be more plausible if they have foibles, but a different pattern of them, and a different mechanism of remediation.

Your Alien will be more lovable with a recognizable foible.

Really study the word foible.  It is the black hole at the center of the Character Arc spiral.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com