Karen S. Wiesner: It's a Miracle, Lois! or Why Your Hero Needs to be the Hero of His Own Story

Based on CPR for Dead or Lifeless Fiction {A Writer's Guide to Deep and Multifaceted Development and Progression of Characters, Plot, and Relationships}

The resolution at the end of a story with improper CPR (Character Plot Relationship) development may read the way a miracle does to those who witness it. Literally, the resolution came out of nowhere and was in no way hinted at, let alone justified, in advance. It defies all logic. Against all odds, somehow (and readers are usually never enlightened or are told in a mishmashed way) the character had an epiphany that magically changed everything. This character became Superman and turned the Earth on its axis so she'd have a "do-over". Maybe a higher being intervened in order for everything to come up roses for her. The "deus ex machina" resolved the conflict, not the character. This god in the machine device introduced a resolution brought about by something outside of the story, something cataclysmic or even supernatural that’s not cohesive or logical with the rest of the story.

To give you an example, I had a problem writing the third novel in my Wounded Warriors Series. Mirror Mirror is romantic paranormal psychological thriller. Spoiler alert! This book continued to elude my best efforts to create something wonderful, suspenseful, and cohesive. My first draft of the book was so bad, I refused to send it to my publisher, even if it meant keeping my fans waiting. I made a long list of notes on all I thought was wrong with the book (believe me, it was a huge document!), then I put the book in my story cupboard for three months in order to get the story brewing on a low flame again. At that time, I came up with another unworkable outline.       

Feeling increasingly desperate, I put the story aside again, terrified I’d never finish something that had already been promoted as “coming soon”. More months went by, during which I had a series of creative percolations that made me rethink the direction of the book. I reshaped all my characters and relationships, consciously trying to flesh them out in ways that related to the plot much more than they had in the past. 

However, it wasn’t until I realized something so obvious, I feel silly about it now that I finally knew why my previous drafts hadn’t worked. The heroine wasn’t directly involved in the resolution of the plot. How could this character achieve her full potential if other characters solved her problems for her? How could the story be cohesive if the character had nothing to do with how the conflicts wrapped up? 

My second realization was that I had to make the plot and subplots fit more naturally with my main character’s struggle not to accept her gift of clairvoyance by pushing it away and feeling ashamed for it. She needed to use her gift in order to solve her problems. Also, her relationships, and how those related to the villain, needed more cohesion. 

I also acknowledged that my little hint earlier in the book that the villain was terrified of dogs was the key to having her save the day. Finally, I decided that the “glue” in making my story cohesive was to make the hero and the heroine’s pasts merge and parallel. Everything fell into place after that. 

You see the challenges I had with the book. I had to make the heroine’s gift of clairvoyance and her beloved dog mesh with the villain’s terrifying curse of clairvoyance and his fear of dogs. All of these things had to fit with the hero and heroine’s pasts, which intersected in ways neither of them ever dreamed prior to the "present" time in the story. The relationships of all the characters also needed to work with conflicts, goals and motivations. I wasn’t sure I’d fully succeeded in this task until a reviewer said of the book, "An excellent psychic thriller that will have you holding your breath until your lungs ache. The author uses her writing gift to connect both Gwen and Dylan’s pasts with a dark, menacing force and tangles a web so strong that readers will not want to stop reading."    

You can’t wrap up a story with an act of nature, something symbolic that parallels a character’s conflict but isn’t actually part of it, or in a (godlike) stranger-to-the-rescue type of event--it won’t be believable or fair to the reader, who’s spent the entire novel waiting to see your characters, plots, and the relationships reach the goal of logical, cohesive self-fulfillment and success.

The main POV character absolutely has to lead the action and save the day on her own without supernatural or miraculous intervention. She isn't in a supporting role, nor can she be rescued when the going gets tough. She can't fall backwards into success. This is her story, her time to be a superhero, her moment in the spotlight. As Galadriel said to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, "This task was appointed to you. And if you do not find a way, no one will.” Or should. 

Never allow resolutions to stem from symbolism, events, or other people. Clear and cohesive choice, purpose, and action are the only viable resolutions. Don't take the true victory away from your main characters by letting anyone or anything else do the work for them.  

Are there defy-explanation moments in your story? You may need to rework your CPR developments to make sure your POV characters are doing their jobs and not letting someone or something else do it for them.

Karen S. Wiesner is the author of CPR for Dead or Lifeless Fiction {A Writer's Guide to Deep and Multifaceted Development and Progression of Characters, Plot, and Relationships}, Volume 6 of the 3D Fiction Fundamentals Collection

http://www.writers-exchange.com/3d-fiction-fundamentals-series/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/writing-reference-titles.html

Happy reading!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series, including MIRROR MIRROR, Book 5: Wounded Warriors Series

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/wounded-warriors-series.html

https://www.writers-exchange.com/wounded-warriors-series/

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Slime Mold Intelligence

Slime molds, a type of gelatinous amoebae, despite having no brains, have the capacity to form memories:

Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence

One species "can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu." When chopped into multiple pieces and scattered through a labyrinth, a specimen not only reunited its separated bits but modified its behavior to find the most efficient routes. As well as mapping their surroundings and retaining memories of areas they have explored, they apparently "navigate time as well as space, using a rudimentary internal clock to anticipate and prepare for future changes in their environments." The article describes some of the intriguing experiments that revealed slime molds' abilities. Lacking brains or nervous systems, nevertheless they "choose conditions most amenable to their survival" and "remember, anticipate and decide."

I once read a story in which two characters argue about the potential intelligence of some nonliving entity. One man asks, "With what would it think, in the absence of a brain?" The other one counters, "With what does a plant think, in the absence of a brain?" Do slime molds and plants "think"? If we equate intelligence with abstract thought, probably not; if we define it as the ability solve problems through adaptation, intelligence could be attributed to almost any kind of organism. If a centuries-old redwood has thought processes, they might operate on a time scale so different from ours that it couldn't communicate with us. If we visited a world dominated by sapient slime molds, would we recognize their intelligence and vice versa?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Elephant In The Reading Room

The Elephant in the Reading Room is Amazon and its policies that hurt authors.

Patricia Bates hosted a Zoom conference on Facebook titled "Storming The Castle" which I highly recommend. Well informed authors and a lawyer from Authors Guild discuss the problem of readers who repeatedly buy, read, and then return ebooks for a full refund. 

Some would call that pretty dishonest. Perhaps the readers do not understand the difference between paying for a KU subscription in order to read KU books, and lending Amazon the price of an ebook for a week.

https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaBatesauthor/videos/1782326232158387/

One can enjoy the production without logging in to Facebook.

Kobo, Google, Barnes and Noble, and Apple are much more author-friendly in their ebook policies. By and large, they will help a reader who buys an e-book and then has difficulty accessing the pages, but they make it very difficult to return an ebook once it has been downloaded or opened.

Rightly so.  An online buyer can read several chapters of an ebook on the bookstore site before making a purchasing decision.

It is fair to be able to return an ebook that was bought by accident, which appears to be the intent with the Amazon Kindle book return policy, but it should not take seven days to discover that one has bought something accidentally.

In the seven days that Amazon allows, a reader can easily read the entire book, and still return it for a full refund.  People do that, and boast about it on TikTok, apparently.  Perhaps those people do not understand that it is the author that they are ripping off. Amazon does not pay the author when a book is borrowed and returned through the ebook sales program.

Amazon controls about 80% of all ebook sales in the USA, and therefore, in theory, 80% of all ebooks sold in America are susceptible to being read and returned.

Cheryl Davis, of Authors Guild is asking for as much data as possible to refute Amazon's claims that the problem is not great and few authors are affected. Any author who has experienced excessive returns is asked to contact staff@authorsguild.org.

She warns that businesses that claim that all calls are recorded are not keeping the recordings for the benefit of the caller.  Recordings may not be made, may not be kept, may not be retrievable. Anyone contacting Amazon about Amazon's policies or returns should be sure to put their issues into writing, and if sending an email, they should cc themselves for proof that they have made contact. 

Again, please watch, like, share this: 

https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaBatesauthor/videos/1782326232158387/

 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday

Karen S. Wiesner: Do I Need a Professional Editor?

 

Writer's Craft Article by Karen S. Wiesner

Do I Need a Professional Editor?

From CPR for Dead or Lifeless Fiction {A Writer's Guide to Deep and Multifaceted Development and Progression of Characters, Plot, and Relationships}

Once upon a time, it was standard practice for every book to go through content editing, line editing, copyediting, and then one or more rounds of proofreading. Every book needs those steps, even those written by professional, highly skilled authors. It might surprise you to know that once upon a time even "vanity publishers" (i.e., those that charge you possibly exorbitant fees to publish your work) had rigorous editing requirements. But, while there are still traditional publishers around who enforce an in-depth editing process for all authors under contract, self- and indie publishers have little or no guidelines, let alone quality requirements placed on them. Far too many authors are cutting corners and self-publishing books that are as far from quality as it gets.

A qualified editor can see quality writing even if he or she doesn't personally enjoy the story. That's not up for debate. Good writing is good writing and free from as many errors as possible. I've read countless books in my line of work as a freelance editor, writing instructor, and contest judge that were wonderfully written. I didn't particularly enjoy them or engage and connect with them, but I could see they were well written (and well edited). So I stand by the fact that good writing is good writing and a true professional can be trusted to judge quality or lack therefore.

A professional editor will point out structural flaws, weak characterization, and bad writing--will absolutely content-, line- and copy-edit as well as proofread a book from start to finish (conceivably multiple times) before it's published. A professional editor won't ask you to revise something because of a difference of opinion, personal bias, or anything that can be considered "up for debate". Professional editors consider their work an art or even a science--and it is for those who have this very rare skill. I could open up yet another can of worms here concerning what makes a professional editor "professional" but that's not the point here. However, keep in mind that there as many unprofessional, unskilled "professional" editors out there who need solid professional credentials as there are unprofessional, unskilled authors who need a professional editor. Do your homework. Find someone who has the credentials (beyond being an author one distributor or a review publication calls a bestseller) for charging authors to edit.

A professional author trusts her editor or she walks away but, either way, an author can't afford to have an overinflated sense of worth or confidence about his work, let alone see every word as golden and therefore set in stone, not to be altered by a lesser mortal. If you realize you simply don't have the skill to do the revisions required to make a book quality, own up to it. Don't slap it up for sale and take money from poor, unsuspecting readers who almost never have an endless amount of money to spend on entertainment. The number of buyers of books is shrinking. Authors and publishers, respect yourself and respect the reader by making it a requirement that you'll only offer the highest quality stories to those readers still out there willing to pay for a good read.

That doesn't change the fact that far too many flawed, poorly written and edited books are being self-published by amateurs who are cutting corners and being lazy about their craft, taking money they haven't earned from readers whose only available course isn't to return the book but to write troll reviews at a distributor's website or never buy another book from that author (not exactly damaging unless riot mobs are amassing at an author's borders). Maybe it's true that these books are being sold in an author's own community and most readers aren't even aware they exist (and let's hope it stays that way). But shouldn't we start thinking about whether bad, sloppy, poorly written books should even be published? They're absolutely flooding the market so everything--good and bad--can only drown in the deluge. If we don't consider it now, when should we? When it's too late? Or is it already?

I would never want to be the one to judge whether a book is worthy to be published, but I've wondered countless times if the publishing industry wouldn't be a stronger place and readers wouldn't benefit immensely if authors and publishers and even distributors actually took the time to evaluate whether a book is quality apart from sales figures. I've also wondered if publishers shouldn't be more discerning. Is the fact that the publisher/editor likes the story reason enough to publish it? If a publisher doesn't have the skills to professionally evaluate and edit the material, or if the editor they hire is subpar (there are so many writer-wanna-be-editors without hard skills working at indie and small press publishing houses these days, it makes me want to cry), the publisher isn't doing the author or readers a favor at all--regardless of what either party believes about the quality of the story in this regard.

I know of an author who came into the indie market presumably because traditional publishers turned him down often and, through a series of what I consider unfortunate events, he went through several small ebook publishers--none of whom required him to do any serious editing of his work. Such a disservice was done to him! This author learned erroneously through these events that he was a good writer when, in fact, the opposite was true. If he'd been forced to do good editing and revisions from the very start, he might have gone on to become a good writer through practice and experience with the correct process for producing a quality book. Ultimately, when he got to the point of being required by a new publisher to do extreme editing of his severely flawed books, self-publishing became the easy out for him. I honestly don't know who to be more disgusted with: All the publishers who weren't discerning enough to turn this author away in the first place or require serious editing from him as a condition of publication, or the author who seemed to prefer not having to do the hard work of being a professional author and didn't mind offering readers low-quality books.

No one has any excuse for publishing bad, poorly written stories. Authors, publishers and distributors, listen up: The true test of a whether a story is quality is not because of any of the following:

1) Friends, family, colleagues, and maybe even a few strangers liked or even loved it (maybe enough to post a 5 star review in a public place).

2) It's published (self-, indie, or any other kind of publisher) or, for that matter, because someone agreed to publish it for the author.

3) The book has sold a lot of copies, whether legitimately or because you or your publisher used a discounted ebook marketing service or simply gave it away free or at a massive discount from a distributor's website.

4) It's a bestseller on any list. Mind you, it is possible to make a bestselling list by "ad stacking"--in other words, you have ads on as many of the discounted ebook marketing services as possible at the same time, which will probably cost more than you make in profit during this time, but your goal is gaining "credibility", not making money. Do an internet search to find out how this is done if you're interested (or, if you're like me, just want to be shocked that people actually do this--why and doesn't it make them feel dirty? because I would feel guilty using this kind of "publicity" to make myself sound more worthy than I actually might be). Bestseller lists are based on how many books are sold or are expected to sell. Is bestselling status retracted from a book that doesn't sell the way it was supposed to? Doubtful, but I can practically guarantee that the status will never be neglected in promotion by that author or publisher. They're absolutely no indication of actual quality of product, merely quantity.

The only true test of a quality book is whether readers found it worth the price they paid for it (or if they would have paid more) and enjoyed it, possibly enough to buy and read other books written by that author. This isn't something that can be adequately tested "in a laboratory" or statistically. Most writers may never know if they passed the quality test unless a reader sends them a note to tell them, puts up a review at a publisher's, distributor's, or the author's own website; or fans prove they love your work in some other definable, quantifiable way.

Karen S. Wiesner is the author of CPR for Dead or Lifeless Fiction {A Writer's Guide to Deep and Multifaceted Development and Progression of Characters, Plot, and Relationships}

Volume 6 of the 3D Fiction Fundamentals Collection

http://www.writers-exchange.com/3d-fiction-fundamentals-series/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/writing-reference-titles.html

Happy writing!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 140 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Folklore 101

At this year's ICFA, I heard a paper by folklore scholar Jeana Jorgensen and was so impressed that I immediately ordered her book FOLKLORE 101. This isn't a book OF folklore, but an introduction to the study of folklore. Jorgensen explains her field in a breezy, colloquial style but also includes an extensive bibliography of books for further, deeper exploration, should readers be so inclined. She defines folklore as "informally transmitted traditional culture." It's shared and passed on outside of official, institutional structures. Thus, while an established religion isn't folkloric, folk religion does exist, e.g., wearing saints' medals for protection or burying a statue in the yard to ensure a quick sale of one's house. Variation and flexibility characterize folklore, whereas an institutional product such as a printed novel by a known author has a fixed form (unless the author or film director releases a revised official version). Tradition need not stretch back centuries or even years to be "traditional." Moreover, the "folk" don't mean just people in preindustrial eras or present-day tribal societies. Folk groups can include hobby clubs, coworkers in an office, people serving in a branch of the military, online virtual communities, even the members of a single family—any group that shares a common culture. It surprised me to read about "personal narratives" as a folklore category. Did you know the retelling of an anecdote about your wedding day constitutes folklore within your family's tradition? Coincidentally, earlier this week I read an article about the top ten stories from their own lives people tell over and over. (Frustratingly, the article didn't list the ten topics.) Older people don't repeat stories mainly because they're forgetful; they do it because those anecdotes hold vital meanings they want to pass on to the younger generations. Just as we all speak prose, we all belong to folk groups and practice folklore.

I ordinarily think of folklore mainly in terms of verbal culture, such as songs, tales, legends, and anecdotes. Proverbs, jokes, and slang also fall into that general area. As Jorgensen's book explains, however, folklore includes many more categories, e.g., foodways, rituals, superstitions, arts and crafts, dance, holiday customs, folk medicine, internet memes, and various other human activities.

Is fan fiction folklore? Yes, although her book mentions it only once, in passing. It's produced informally, outside official, commercial structures. It exhibits variation and is communicated within a folk community. The fanfic community has its own traditions and dialect, e.g., the invention of the term "slash" for same-sex romance between fictional characters. Filk music is certainly folklore. Songs can be set to either composers' original tunes or existing music. The latter can consist of either parody or serious rewriting. The videos made by some fans by combining clips from movies or TV shows would also count as folklore, although they don't come into Jorgensen's book. So material originally produced by official, institutional, and/or commercial sources can become appropriated by folk culture, subject to variation and traditional transmission.

When does a commercial product created by a known artist become folkloric? How old does it have to be? Does it have to be in the public domain? Woody Guthrie's song "This Land Is Your Land" is probably thought of by many Americans as a folk song. Guthrie himself encouraged others to add verses. Nineteenth-century composer Stephen Foster's "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" was parodied by Bugs Bunny, a commercial song being "filked" by a commercial animated character. Similarly, the tune of the Civil War song "Aura Lea" was used by Elvis Presley for "Love Me Tender." There's a filk song about the Apollo 13 near-disaster sung to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." Despite Jorgensen's lucid explanations, I'm still a little fuzzy on the boundaries of "folk" transmission and variation. To cite a shift in the other direction, Jean Lorrah wrote a collection of Star Trek fanfic stories called the "Night of the Twin Moons" series—folkloric variation on a commercial popular culture product. However, her professional Star Trek novels THE VULCAN ACADEMY MURDERS and THE IDIC EPIDEMIC clearly belong to the same fictional universe as her fanfic, although with "the serial numbers filed off," as the saying goes. And the origin of the commercial bestseller FIFTY SHADES OF GREY as thinly veiled TWILIGHT fanfic is well known.

The richly diverse nuances of folk creations in the overall category of songs and stories can be endlessly fascinating.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Earth Month, IP Week, Earth Day....

April is Earth Month. Earth Day is April 22nd.

Intellectual Property week is April 25th - 29th (a very short week), and IP Day is April 26th.

 

The CopyrightAlliance is also celebrating Arab American Heritage Month by sharing profiles of Arab American creators on the copyrightalliance's social media sites every Friday in April.

 

The WIPO theme for IP Day this year is  Intellectual Property and Youth, Innovating for a Better Future.

https://www.wipo.int/ip-outreach/en/ipday/

 

The official hashtag for 2022 is #WorldIPDay.

https://www.wipo.int/ip-outreach/en/ipday/2022/toolkit/social-media-guidelines.html

 

Although the theme is focused on young persons (defined as under 35 years of age), IP day is a great name-exposure opportunity for any writer or blog author who takes the time to register their blog or website in advance, and to write an on-topic blog for the day, and to link it to the WIPO and copyrightalliance bloglinks.

 

There will also be multiple events and presentations, and blog-hopping, and if you are set up with a photo and textlink sig file, and are willing to leave encouraging and selfless comments on other persons' pages, that is more excellent exposure. 

Some sites use spam filters, such as Akismet, which is why it is important to know how to avoid being mistaken for spam!  Not every site allows links within comments. Know the policy.

If you have not joined copyrightalliance.org, membership is free and very good value.

 

WIPO offers tools.

https://www.wipo.int/ip-outreach/en/ipday/2022/toolkit/index.html

 

The secret is to promote the cause (intellectual property awareness + interests of young creators), and probably keep a count-down calendar so that you are registered and ready to participate in as many events as possible, in the best possible taste (to coin a phrase), and with maximum generous relevance.

 

The Copyright Alliance will be updating their website with blog topics in the coming days.

https://copyrightalliance.org/trending-topics/celebrating-world-ip-day/

 

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is hosting two events: Innovating For A Better Future  and The Way Forward for Intellectual Property Internationally.  

 

You can expect that Music Tech Policy, and TheTrichordist will probably support the international day of blogging about IP. It is likely that some of the legal blogs such as FileWrapper, The IP Law Blog, and The Global IP and Technology Law blog may also celebrate IP Day.

 

As for Earth Day, I plan to plant a herb garden!

 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ 

http://www.spacesnark.com/  

http://www.rowenacherry.com

 

 

 

 

Karen S. Wiesner: Advice for New Authors

 Writer's Craft Article by Karen S. Wiesner

Advice for New Authors

From CPR for Dead or Lifeless Fiction {A Writer's Guide to Deep and Multifaceted Development and Progression of Characters, Plot, and Relationships}

First, I don’t believe there are absolutes in writing. There are so many writing trends, no-no’s, and must-do’s. I admit I find most of them silly. The only rules are the ones you enforce yourself. Don’t let anyone else tell you differently. Here are seven pieces of advice for becoming a professional author:

1) Do your homework in learning to successfully navigate the extremely treacherous waters of trying to book writing and publishing. Don’t rely on anyone else to give you all the answers. Figuring out how all this works is your job and it’s vital that you learn all you can because you’re at the helm of your own career. Do you really want someone else who may or may not be trustworthy floating your boat? 

2) Learn how to use a critique. Get used to having your work picked apart ruthlessly by your peers now because I guarantee that even an editor who loves your work can rip it to shreds. And let's not even get into readers who live to destroy not only one book by an author by conceivably a whole career with their trolling. Develop a thick, tough skin before you get published, so you can handle it professionally when the time comes. But also keep in mind that an edit who’s rewriting your story the way he or she wants it isn’t helping you at all.

3) Even if--or more aptly, especially if--you're choosing the self-publishing route, good editors will make your books better, even if it feels like they’re destroying them in the process. Don’t assume a heavy edit makes you a bad author (and vice versa—a light edit doesn’t necessarily make you a good one either). One way or another, editing is part of the process.

 4) Don’t try to write what’s popular, what’s expected or what’s selling. How many more teenage vampire books do we need? Write what moves and inspires you, regardless of trends. In the same vein, don’t limit yourself to writing what you know. Honestly, I know nothing about what it's like to be a werewolf—but I love writing about them! Write the book of your heart. Be true to your story first. 

5) Develop self-discipline now, before your book is published. When you’re first starting out, it might work to write by the seat of your pants. A professional author knows the more efficient you are in the process of writing each book, the more momentum you build in your career because you can offer more high-quality books in less time. While not everyone can use a full-blown outline, some kind of a blueprint, however loose, is crucial. You can’t be a productive writer if you’re constantly going on blind treasure hunts, hoping that a story will eventually immerse from hundreds or thousands of pages of the written word (and may not). Be disciplined. Use a guideline instead of writing blindly and set goals for your writing so you're always moving forward with continuous momentum.

6) Be responsible for yourself as an author in as many aspects of your career as you can. I realized early on in my career that there was little a publisher could do for me that I couldn’t do just as well for myself. I try to make sure every book I turn in to an editor is of the highest quality (and ensure that my editors hardly have to do anything at all for me) so in that way I’m my own editor as well the author of the material. I can’t blame anyone else if I’m not disciplined or subpar. I’m responsible for my own success (or failure) in that way. Authors are also capable of designing quality covers with software and utilizing cover designer services available all over the internet.

7) There's a growing trend, especially with traditional publishers, for the author to "prove their worth" and become a social media star, if they aren't already, by doing all the promotion for every book they sell--in fact, often there's a requirement for the author to detail their aggressive marketing plans before a contract will even be offered. All of this means that most publisher don't do a whit of promotion for their authors (though, in my case, I got lucky with a publisher who's all over the social media blitz). Maybe it's true that authors can market their own books better than anyone else, but publishers need to do their part as well. In the treacherous waters the book industry has become these days, publishers have almost exclusively placed the weight of promotion solely on the author's shoulders in order to stay afloat in the shrinking marketplace. Many contracts signed these days force authors to promote in ways that may not be financially feasible for them (in that case, they probably had to forgo a contract altogether). Publishers have traditionally been the ones to make sure a book is available in all the formats readers use and to list the books at distributor websites. But publishers these days no longer want to be the ones to make the books move in those channels--and the publishers are the ones who can provide the biggest push and momentum. Without them, that means authors swim upstream right from the get-go. Because of this, it's not at all surprising that so many writers choose to self-publish or "indie publish" rather than deal with the drama and bad contracts that give them little or nothing in return for a piece of their soul and the absolute limits of their blood, sweat, and tears.

Make the rules for your own career as much as possible, but remember your first priority is to provide the best quality book you can that readers will not only want to pay to read but will feel is worth every penny they spent after they read it.

Karen S. Wiesner is the author of CPR for Dead or Lifeless Fiction {A Writer's Guide to Deep and Multifaceted Development and Progression of Characters, Plot, and Relationships}

Volume 6 of the 3D Fiction Fundamentals Collection

http://www.writers-exchange.com/3d-fiction-fundamentals-series/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/writing-reference-titles.html

Happy writing!

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series. Visit her here:

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

SF Versus Fantasy

At this year's ICFA (which I wrote about last week), one of the free goodies distributed at meals was a copy of the March/April 2020 ASIMOV'S magazine. It happened to include a provocative article by David D. Levine called "Thoughts on a Definition of Science Fiction." The author takes an approach to distinguishing science fiction from fantasy that never occurred to me before.

Of course, this perennial and never-settled question has many proposed answers. And many works cross genre boundaries; SF is a "fuzzy set." Anne McCaffrey's Pern and Marion Zimmer Bradley's pre-rediscovery Darkover, although science fiction, have a fantasy "feel." S. M. Stirling's Emberverse series, beginning with DIES THE FIRE, clearly near-future or alternate-history SF, also includes something like magic. Diane Duane's Young Wizards series focuses on the protagonists' learning and using magic—which they prefer to label "wizardry" to avoid the implication that it can do anything, unbounded by rules—yet they visit distant planets and make friends with extraterrestrials. Cases like these are part of why the term "speculative fiction" is so useful.

Levine suggests that the distinction between fantasy and science fiction rests on a fundamental difference between worldviews. Science fiction arises from an Enlightenment worldview and fantasy from a pre-Enlightenment worldview. In SF, "the universe is logical, predictable, and understandable, governed by rules that are impersonal and have no moral dimension." Fantasy, on the other hand, inhabits a universe that "has a moral compass, and is governed by rules that, though they may be understandable, are not necessarily always consistent, logical, or predictable in their application." For example, fantasy contains swords that can be drawn only by the "pure in heart" (a moral dimension). As an extension of this definition, Levine focuses on the central importance of "the means by which characters affect the world," whether by technology or by magic. Using this principle, he maintains that the later Star Wars films, after the original movie, slip further and further into fantasy territory because of the way the Force becomes more powerful and less scientifically plausible (e.g., action at a distance).

While I admire his theory, it doesn't align completely with my own concept of the SF-fantasy divide. I've always seen the distinction as—perhaps too simplistically—primarily a matter of authorial intent as it appears on the surface of the text. If the text claims a scientific rationale for its phenomena, it's science fiction. If not, it's fantasy. Edgar Rice Burroughs's interplanetary adventures count as science fiction, even if most of the science is obsolete. Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy mysteries, set in an alternate-history England in a world where magic plays a commonplace role in society, are fantasy even though the rules of magic are systematic and predictable. What about works such as Madeleine L'Engle's A WRINKLE IN TIME and its sequels and spinoffs, invoking scientific principles, featuring visits to other worlds, and marketed as SF, but containing some elements of apparent magic as well as a religious worldview? Or C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, wherein the superhuman intelligences ruling the other planets are also identified as angels? The Wild Sorceress trilogy, co-written by my husband and me, starts as apparent fantasy, to be revealed as SF at the end of the third book. Well, that's where the flexible terms "science fantasy" and "speculative fiction" come in handy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt