Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 14 - Selling the Happily Ever After Ending by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration

Part 14

Selling the Happily Ever After Ending

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg  

Here is the index to the series Theme-Worldbuilding Integration:

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

We've been boring down into the core of the problem of why Romance Genre does not get the respect it deserves with the general audience, and why those who do read Romance Genre have begun to reject the plausibility of the Happily Ever After Ending.

Last week, in Depiction Part 14, we circled around the methodology of depicting cultural shifts as part of giving a novel "depth" -- by showing rather than telling the way the protagonist's world has changed from the world their grandparents grew up in.

Now we "get into the weeds" by confronting nasty truths that need to be omitted from Romance Genre in order to create the "mood."

Yet without those truths (theme) being part of the protagonist's world (worldbuilding) there is no verisimilitude.  Without verisimilitude, the reader can no "suspend disbelief" and follow your Romance plot into a relationship with an Alien - a non-human from way out there.

Great science fiction always includes exciting scientific speculation as the solution to the problem, but problem-solving ability in humans always stems from the personal relationships (warped, ordinary, or non-existent) of the problem solver.

Humans are driven to solve problems by the effect of the problem on those they love.   Sometimes it is "self-love" (narcissism) that is the driver, but the power building up behind that dam of emotions will explode outward the moment a Love is spotted.  Even a narcissist can throw him/herself into the breach for Love.  When that happens, Love truly conquers all.

There it is - an unpardonable gaffe in our modern society where your reader resides. Love Conquers All.

The mechanism by which the conquering happens is as imaginary as the "science" used in science fiction.  And in truth, Imagination (Neptune) is the targeting mechanism of Magic and Science both. What humans can imagine, humanity can accomplish.

You've seen that with Star Trek from the 1960's.

How many of the imaginary, impossible, "instruments" and theories behind the Enterprise "depiction" are now in play in our world, changing our world? The A.I. computer that talks, the typewriter that takes dictation, the "communicator" that can reach orbit and back (our whole satellite communications system beams TV shows around the world). We have nailed the science behind the Transporter, and are in hot pursuit of the FTL drive.  Most of that work has been done by a handful of people inspired by Star Trek in their extreme youth.  In another lifetime, we may see Star Wars "magic" of The Force come into play.

Just as the Science Fiction Writer must "convince" the reader (if only for a short time) that FTL travel is "possible," so the Romance Writer must "convince" the reader that the HEA is possible.

The HEA is a hard sell these days. Our objective has been to figure out why it is such a hard sell, so we can solve this problem, and spread out the solution before our readers to energize their imagination the way Star Trek energized the scientific imagination.

The writer must lull the reader into suspension of disbelief as the first step, then argue the point in show-don't-tell.  Show Don't Tell is done by symbolism and depiction, not plot or dialogue.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-5-how.html  has links to previous posts in this series .

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

"Selling" or salesmanship requires the integration of at least two skills (usually more).  You have to know the nature of what you are selling. You have to know the nature of the buyer.

Getting a "match" is very hard, so when a mis-match between product and buyer happens, we call that a "hard sell."  That generally refers to a salesman trying to make a person do something against their nature in such a way as to be against their best interests, and for the salesman's profit.

In the case of a Writer selling the Idea of the Happily Ever After ending, the random reader browsing a bookstore may have a 50% chance of regarding the Idea of the HEA as inimical to their wellbeing.

How can I say 50%?  I don't have an article, a survey, a scientific study to point you to.  All I have is the current Election Issues being bandied about by USA political parties.

Pundits refer to the generation gap we discussed last week as a process of "polarization."

Here is a video clip of Donald Trump as a Guest of George H.W. Bush at the Republican Convention where he said some "Republican Things" when he was in his 40's.

http://patriotupdate.com/discovered-video-trump-1988-republican-convention-said-may-shock/

And the media has been full of clips of Donald Trump saying "Democratic Things" until recently, 2008 onwards, when he started to shade into saying "Republican Things."

Now look at the polls over all those decades.  Look at the election results.  Mostly we only remember who the winner was (we don't recall the losers).  Look at the margin by which winners win -- not at who won or why, just the difference between them in the popular vote.

You'll see a trend of that difference narrowing.

Most of your target readership will be unaware of that narrowing, consciously, but they have grown up in the world created by that narrowing trend - a world of increasing philosophical (thematic) stress.

That shows up clearly in the nasty-horrible tweets posted (often by people who get paid to swamp a target person in vitriol).   Your readers read to step out of that stress-zone, or have their opinions of the nasty folks validated.  Some read to experience vicariously what it's like to destroy someone.  Others want to believe that love is possible, even for them.

So how do you "hard sell" that readership the Idea that the HEA is not only possible but almost inevitable?

As noted above, you have to understand what the HEA actually is, and how it works, why it works, on what occasions it works.  You have to understand the nature of Reality that generates the HEA as a symptom of life itself, not a lofty far-off goal, but a function of the "scientific" reality the reader is embedded within.

There are, of course, thousands of philosophical systems humanity has discovered and invented which assert and demonstrate that the HEA is a natural consequence of being "A Good Person."

Some of those systems are called "Religion" these days.

We class "Religion" as part of the Fantasy Genre, and Fantasy as the opposite of Science Fiction.

Take another look at the cultural shift from the 1980's to today.  Look at the books published and the genre labels on the spines.

Before around 1980, science fiction was the label on far-out fantasy novels that were really about Religion.

In 1979, Katherine Kurtz's first novel, Camber of Culdi, was a product of clumsy writing but profound thinking.

http://www.amazon.com/Camber-Culdi-Legends-V/dp/0345280318/

Camber of Culdi hit the paperback stands and rocketed to the top of the charts. Now it is re-issued and available in all sorts of formats.

Sequels were demanded, and written -- now it's called a Classic Series.  I've used Deryni as an example previously:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/08/strong-character-defined-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/03/depiction-part-9-depicting-hero-by.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/03/depiction-part-9-depicting-hero-by.html

It was blatantly about Magic and Religion (an oil and water mix, symbolizing the immiscible mix of Science And Religion we deal with today).

Deryni was optioned by Columbia - it is a vivid work that could translate to the big screen.

http://movieweb.com/columbia-picks-up-katherine-kurtzs-deryni-rising/

The Deryni Series (which I highly recommend) was marketed as fantasy, but bookstores shelved it with the science fiction. That publication marked the splitting off of Fantasy from Science Fiction until decades later, the Science Fiction Writers of American added "Fantasy" to their name, "Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers of America" -- not used anymore.

In the attempt, in the 1950's and 1960's to define science fiction, the famous end to the argument was, "All fiction is fantasy."  Which I see as a usable truth for writers, but not for readers.

Any fictional work, regardless of setting or plot, cradles the Characters in a made-up World built by the writer.

What would Hollywood do to Deryni to turn it into a blockbuster film?

Just as with Ursula LeGuinn's Earthsea Trilogy, Hollywood (as TV or miniseries, or film) would change the theme.

That's what they always do - change the book's theme to make it worth the price of producing it as a visual.

Films cost more to make than a book costs to print, but theater entry fees are about the price of a paperback, more or less. So a film must get more people to buy it to make back millions invested plus a profit to invest in the next film project.

As we learned by studying SAVE THE CAT! - the size of the audience depends on the theme-worldbuilding structure that cradles and presents the plot, as black velvet displays a diamond.

So take a look at the re-issue pages on Amazon for the Deryni novels.  The envelope theme connecting all these books is "The Good Guy Wins Against All Odds Because Of His/Her Goodness."

The quality of goodness wins, even when society as a whole labels that goodness as evil incarnate.

The Deryni have a natural "talent" for Magic -- in fact, those that have the gift for magic can't not-do magic, and must be trained and disciplined so as not to be a danger.

There has been a war to exterminate the Deryni because one of them siezed the Throne by using Magical Power and then did serious dirt to the "normal" human subjects of the Kingdom.  So there was a revolution and now only humans can be King. Except for one problem -- interbreeding happens.

So all the novels are plotted to be "about" "Who Will Be King."

And the Bad Guys win a lot -- a lot, and often -- but the Good Guys have triumph and generations of HEA.

Or at least, Happily For Now -- but the "now" is decades.

The Deryni series is liberally laced with love stories.  But the core of the matter is that the universe has nasty forces destructive to life in it, but The Good Guys Win Because of Goodness.

In that, it is like Star Wars we burst onto the scene in 1977 -- contemporary with Kurtz's series -- and integrated elements of Fantasy (The Force; Magic) with Science Fiction's classic galactic war, and the Hero's Journey, one man makes a difference.

Luke Skywalker was a winner because of his Goodness, and the color of his Lightsaber symbolized that while the plot scattered and blurred that message enough for the 1977 audience to eat it up and lick the plate.

Look at statistics through time in America (or wherever you intend to be published.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/upshot/big-drop-in-share-of-americans-calling-themselves-christian.html

--------quote NY Times----------
“The decline is taking place in every region of the country, including the Bible Belt,” said Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at the Pew Research Center and the lead editor of the report.

The decline has been propelled in part by generational change, as relatively non-Christian millennials reach adulthood and gradually replace the oldest and most Christian adults. But it is also because many former Christians, of all ages, have joined the rapidly growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated or “nones”: a broad category including atheists, agnostics and those who adhere to “nothing in particular.”

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

That's a profile of your readership by the New York Times who thought they were writing about Religion.

What is the connection between Religion (or religious affiliation) and understanding the HEA as a natural consequence of Life?

It is that notion of "The Good Guy Wins" not because he's a Guy but because he's Good.

The entire "feminist" movement (again a 1970's phenomenon) is a red-herring as far as the Romance Writer is concerned.  Oh yes, it's vital in portraying your lead Character as a kick-ass-broad the equal of any man in her world.  Only recently has the Romance Genre allowed the female lead to be A Strong Character because the self-perception of young women has shifted -- for the better, in my never-humble opinion.

But women came out of the mud of the gutter of human society mad-as-hell-and-not-going-to-take-it-anymore.

As a result, we have a Fantasy genre full of kick-ass-heroines, Kung Fu Masters all, who can take a beating as well as inflict one.  They don't worry about "good vs bad" and which is which -- they go with their gut.

The writers have "read" their buyers correctly and produced Lead Characters whose guts agree with their readership.  It's a soft-sell.

Now we have a generation that has grown up on kick-ass-heroine images as the essence of what it means to be feminine.

We are beginning to see a shift, though. We have 1940's hairstyles come back, shrink-wrap clothing modeled after videogame characters, and the Soccer Mom image of raising kids heroically.

In 1984, we had the TV Series Scarecrow And Mrs. King -- where a typical Mom ventured out as a secret agent and was better than the men (once she got over being Lucy Ricardo-scared).

And in 1982 we had Remington Steele http://www.amazon.com/License-to-Steele/dp/B0010HYINW/    where a woman invented a man to "front" for her private detective agency, then had a guy walk in who impersonated her imaginary boss.

In both those shows, The Good Guy/Gal Wins Because They Are Good.

And the Bad Guy Loses Because He's Bad.

Hollywood doesn't invent these trends or Ideas.  Hollywood is in the business of making a profit "validating" their customer's feelings with visual proof, in show don't tell, that the world really is as they suspect it is.

Hollywood doesn't do "hard-sell" -- Hollywood does "soft-sell" -- Hollywood produces reflections of the audiences, at the budget points that the size of that audience justifies. Hollywood makes a profit.

Today, Hollywood is making new Star Trek (that crushingly disappoints those who grew up in the 1960's and validates those who grew up in the 2000's.)  Retreads of classics abound -- and all of them display a marked shift in theme.

The overall theme revealing the unconscious assumptions of the paying audience in the 1980's was that Goodness Prevails Because it is Goodness.  And more than that, you can determine what is good and what is not-good by checking the Bible.

In the 2010's (we're mid-way at this writing), we see a trend, reflected in the political divisions between the USA Democratic Party and the USA Republican Party, saying "The Bad Guys Always Win Unless We Use Science To Force Them To Behave Properly."  And you can tell the bad guys because they loudly proclaim they are Christians, then behave as anything but Christians (advocating war, cruelty to women, and throwing off all civil discipline.)

Your audience  has become "polarized."  They have separated themselves according to selected "beliefs" and gone to separate corners, waiting for the bell to start a slugfest.

Politicians and social scientists try very hard to label these groupings, to figure out what belief belongs on which side of the boxing ring.

Writers have to speak to both sides, equally, without advocating one over the other, to make sales figures that justify mass market paperback publication.  That's why it is called "mass market" -- because it's bigger than any group.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/12/pew-religious-landscape-survey-2014_n_7259770.html

And here is an article from CNN talking about religious affiliation drop in both parties -- more emphatic in the Democratic Party than the Republican.  It is a general trend, and seen even among older people.  The 2015 survey by Pew Research did assert that 70% of the USA still says they are Christian.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/03/politics/poll-religious-decline-among-democrats-gop/

From that article, I don't think everyone who says they are "Christian" means the same thing by the word.

----------CNN QUOTE--------
One political issue in particular has benefited from a sea change in religious attitudes -- same-sex marriage. Consistent with the political and legal changes to gay rights that have taken place in the United States over the past year, the Pew survey demonstrates that the share of all Christians saying that homosexuality should be accepted by society increased from 44% in 2007 to 54% in 2014.

-------END CNN QUOTE---------

Trace that political trend (remember the early 1980's was "The Reagan Era" ) next to the decline in acceptance of the HEA, with the rise of the Kick Ass Heroine.

Just because you see a correlation in the graphic curve, don't assume there's a cause-effect relationship.

But you can build a world around the theme that there is a cause-effect relationship between religious views, a particular standard of what constitute's the Good that Wins Because it's Good, and the accessibility of the HEA to your Characters.

You build the world your Characters must puzzle out, build its physics, chemistry, biology, its science, in such a way as to reveal to the reader what is "Good" and how the practice of "Good" generates success.

In our real, everyday world that your reader lives in, we see that Bad always wins. Just listen to what Bernie Sanders has said while running for President.  He's popular because he paints an accurate picture of what his voters see in their world.  He validates their view of their world, deplores it with them, and points to the solutions that seem obvious to his voters.

Donald Trump does the same thing, making it clear he shares his voters' assessment of reality and will apply the rules of Good Guy Behavior to solve those problems.

Both are problem-solvers writ large.  Both engage their audience's sense that Goodness Will Prevail "if only" we do what Good Guys do.

They differ on what "Good" actually is.

Don't forget to check out Ted Cruz and his followers, assessing what they think is the "Good" action that will lead to an HEA for the country.

Tease all this political theater apart until you can see the Theme and the Worldbuilding as separate factors in our real world.  In the everyday reality, they are so entangled very few specialists can ever tease them apart. Practicing separation of Theme from World is what writers do as compulsively and incessantly as we people-watch.

Once you can see your reader's everyday reality as composed of theme and a world that illustrates that theme, you can choose new content for the theme element and new content for the world element, then re-integrate your created ingredients into a story that all readers can believe (for a while.).

We read fiction to believe something we actually don't believe, just to try it on for a while. We read to walk a mile in someone else's moccasins.  We read Alien Romance to grasp an bizarre and impossible problem, and then problem-solve along with the Characters, rooting for the Good Guy to win because he/she is Good.

Here's a post in the Theme-Plot-Character-Worldbuilding Integration series that pertains to this idea of what Goodness is and what properties the world has to have to tilt probability so that Goodness causes Winning, at least when pitted against Not-Goodness.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/04/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding.html

Ponder the relationship between the world you live in and the forces that shape probability around you. That's what Magic and Fantasy generally depict - a world where human will, emotion, intention, shape consequences.  In science, nothing you think or feel matters in terms of the working of physical laws.

In science, what you do causes what happens.

In magic, who you ARE causes what happens.

Are these two views of reality irreconcilable?

What if you write a Romance between one who lives in a world where who you are does not matter (e.g. where it is stupid to believe in the HEA) and one who lives in a world where the way to achieve the HEA is to  become the Good Guy by strengthening Character (not body).

What does she see in him?  What does he see in her?

You can do that story in any setting and sparks will fly, readers of every stripe will flock to the book.

It is the pattern behind the TV Series, X-Files which we discussed briefly in Part 13 of this series on Theme-Worldbuilding Integration.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/05/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-13.html

And just for good measure, here is an article about great, bestselling writers telling you that good people don't make good Characters.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/tony-tulathimutte-private-citizens-philip-roth-by-heart/463002/

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Round-Up Of Other People's Copyright-Related Opinions

This will be brief... but if you click the links, you will find plenty to read!

This links to The Atlantic and chronicles just how easy e-books have made life for plagiarists and copyright infringers. Really, IMHO, publishers and authors may have made a huge long term mistake in jumping aboard (before they were well and truly ready) when Amazon launched the Kindle.

To read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/plagiarism-in-the-age-of-self-publishing/485525/
 
Caveat, according to a conversation I had recently with a female millennial, only "strange"and "unpopular"  people like science fiction and science fact, and see the fascination in mixing Psychology with Politics and Power. Alas! To my way of thinking, this is all grist for SF plots, because few people would believe what could be going on, right at our fingertips... unless they grew up reading "1984", "Brave New World" and the like.

To read:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/Google-Political-Spending-Mission-Creepy.pdf

Or watch...   this one goes to a video.  The conclusions are very Big Brotherish, and alarmingly logical. Big Brother is not only watching you, he is telling you what to think.  And have you noticed? The government will prosecute you for real if they find out that you don't think the "settled" way about certain matters! How safe are you from detection if you "search" using politically incorrect search terms?

If a large population gets all their news from the internet, and they find most of their news by conducting a search, and the search engine "helpfully guesses" the rest of the sentence as they are typing, it should be possible to lead people to think the way one wants them to think.

To watch:
https://musictechpolicy.com/2016/06/10/google-has-been-actively-altering-search-results-to-favor-hillary-clinton/

I think I'll try to duplicate the experiment. But, here's a funny thing. I've provided three links. I cut and pasted all of them from my email "Draft" folder. (My habit is, when I find something interesting during the week, I start a brief email to myself and save it for you all.) For each link, I pasted it on the page, then I hit the "Link" function and made sure that the link work.  However, when I checked "preview" only one of the three showed up. Hmmm. So, I colored them yellow... and now they show up as pink. I've added second urls and all seems to be well, so I guess I made a mistake.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

Greetings from Abroad

Today I'm returning from a package tour of Ireland. It started in Dublin and focused on the centennial of the 1916 Easter Rising. Our favorite Irish folk singer, Seamus Kennedy, came along as "native guide" and sang for us many evenings.

Here's an overview of Seamus's Ireland tours:

Seamus Kennedy Travel Page

I'll share some tidbits about the trip next week.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Depiction Part 14 - Depicting Cultural Shifts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Depiction

Part 14

Depicting Cultural Shifts

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Here is the index post with previous parts of Depiction.

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

A friend mentioned watching the new TV Series Lucifer, where the Devil asks what is the one thing you want -- and the plot unfolds from that choice.

I've started watching the show BEFORE Lucifer about a school for young magicians, THE MAGICIANS (which is fairly well made) so I've seen the trailers and the beginnings of Lucifer.

I thought the concept interesting, but in the context of what viewers now will understand about the world decades hence,  I am looking for what KIND of spouse they will imagine for themselves later.  What will the young teens watching these two shows conclude about "happily ever after" and "soul mates" later on in life?

Personally, I expect that in a few decades they will have thrown off most of the ideas presented in these shows, and in most fantasy novels, just as prior generations have. We, as humans, don't believe everything we're taught, especially not by parents or authority figures.

In the meantime, though, a great deal of (easily dramatized) headline material will be created by these viewers as the mature.

Here's one way to look at this whole spectrum of Marketing Fiction in a Changing World -- a subject we've discussed at length in these posts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

Remember how people always say,  "I'm doing all I can" which essentially dismisses the petitioner as irrational for wanting more than "I can" -- saying I'm the helpless one and that's too bad for you.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/03/depiction-part-9-depicting-hero-by.html

OK, watching NYPD Blue season 1 from the 1980's I see a pivot point in a related attitude to the helplessness of "I'm doing all I can -- so how dare  you ask more of me!"

Today, absolutely everywhere, we hear the phrase "been taught" or even just "what we teach kids in schools."  Some politicians want to beef up the Department of Education because "what we teach kids has to be controlled so they'll behave properly" -- and other politicians demanding to dismantle the Department of Education and  "let" localities decide what to teach kids.

The unconscious assumption behind that language is that "permission" is required. Never in human history has humanity as a whole accepted "permission" as a limitation.  That's why we have Heros (to depict) and Villains (likewise to depict).

We have internal conflicts because, as a whole, humanity just does not "believe" what we are "told" or "taught" to believe.  We learn it, parrot it back for the test, then discard all -- or at least a few of us discard.

And among those few who discard what they've "been taught" we have major internal conflicts, sometimes psychologically crippling conflicts that cause what appears to be "irratic" or "irrational" behavior, temperamental outbursts and so on.  The subconscious retains some of what we've "been taught" no matter how the conscious discards it.

The subconscious can be reprogrammed though, and that happens with a great deal of DRAMA in life (Pluto is Drama, remember).  Dramatizing those lessons reprogramming the subconscious is what fiction writers do -- and it is the core material for Romance which is why Love Stories must be woven into most other genre fiction.

In truth, Love does Conquer All.  Exactly how that happens is what we write about.

So historically, schools have been putting all LEARNING into the same category as "what I can't do."  You can only do "what you've been taught."

Our current culture depicts kids and the adults they become as VICTIMS of "what they are taught."

Kids and even adults are victims so it is up to the Educators (who implicitly know best) to be sure that kids "are taught" only "right" things.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/science-teachers-grasp-of-climate-change-is-found-lacking.html

What has climate change to do with Romance?  Well, along with the unconscious assumptions underlying the dilemma of "what to teach them" (because if you teach wrong, they will suffer and it will be your fault, see last week's post)  we have the matter of teaching "you can't win" and there is no "Happily Ever After" so don't even try.

"You can't win" is taught by demonstrating authority, and telegraphing "allowed" as the key.  Authority must "permit" or "allow" or "provide" -- authority must act first or you can't "have" anything.

"There is no Happily Ever After" is transmitted the student's real life experiences of divorce, job loss, and the constant din of "it is not your fault; the system is broken."  You can't win because you're not permitted to -- permission is everything.

Here is last week's post on Authority, Responsibility and Power in Alien Romance -- how these nebulous concepts are essential to worldbuilding that can cradle a hot Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/05/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-13.html

That "no such thing as Happily Ever After" carries over into what passes for adulthood these days, as people lose jobs to technology and "are doing all they can" to "find a job" and can only "do all they can" which is limited by "what I was taught."

It may be time to entertain the notion that the HEA is possible, but only to those with a Hero's attitude that if you are doing all you can, and it isn't enough, do what you can't anyway.

The whole idea of making college free telegraphs that the real objective is to be certain there is no such thing as a well educated adult running around in the world.

You can't "get an education" -- it isn't an object to be acquired.  It is a condition of the brain, created by exercise.  That exercise is not acquired by "being taught" but by "learning."

 You can learn to live Happily Ever After, but you can not be taught to do it.

Educated adults point out that permission to Live Happily Ever After is not necessary.  You have to do "more than you can" -- a successful marriage requires each give more than 100%.  

Humanity has talents distributed along a curve -- and only 1% are CAPABLE of a university education beyond Bachelor's.  If you try to put everyone through University, it will become grammar school, not University.  Those who want to "get an education" will be happy with their diploma from such a school -- those who want to "learn" will go elsewhere.

That 1%  that can not be kept from learning because they need no permission ignores the "all I can" limit and just does things regardless of whether they "can" or not, regardless of whether they've "been taught."

You can't TEACH that 1%.  What you think means nothing to them.
So perpetuating the idea that you "can't do" what you "have not been taught" is an attack on the 1% by the 99%.

So here's an idea to check out by watching old stuff on Amazon Prime or Netflix.

The 1980's (Reagan) era was a turning point in HEROISM.

Captain Kirk of Star Trek was a 1960's phenomenon popular with people born in the late 1940's -- people who grew to college age seeing their parents succeed against all odds, and thus convinced they, too, could succeed against all odds.  They just needed to learn  how, not to "be taught."

Kids born in the 1960's became 20-somethings in the 1980's experiencing families (and kids their age's families) that were more loosely constituted (sometimes parents lived together, not married), increasing divorce rate, both parents employed (that was rare in the 1950's before "labor saving devices" made "housework" less than a full time job), and families being moved across country as the Dad "climbed the corporate ladder."  Neighborhood friends, school friends, extended family -- all temporary.

Kids who turned twenty in the 1980's "knew" from experience that all personal ties are merely temporary, so don't invest your heart in other people.

The cell phone, Facetime, text chat, and so on, changed all that and today's children hold friendships no matter where they are physically.
Here's the essence of TV Drama popular in the 1950's and 1960's (Star Trek) and 1970's.

THE GOOD GUY WINS BECAUSE HE IS GOOD - NOT BECAUSE HE'S A GUY.

The feminist movement (1970's) destroyed that whole philosophy (fiction themes are philosophical statements) by blaming "winning" on "guy-ness" not on "good-ness."

So women learned to become "bad-ass" in order to win because goodness doesn't win.

Then another generation tackled the whole "goodness" thing with the idea that everything is relative and "fairness"="goodness" because fairness means everyone gets THE SAME THING regardless of their personal merit.

The concept of GOODNESS that drove the 1950's got thrown in the toilet.

Then GOODNESS was replaced with Political Correctness -- the values of which are reflected in the TV Series Lucifer where "Lucifer" is the the protagonist, who always wins.  Everyone else is the "problem of the week."

In the TV Series The Magicians the theme is stated as Magicians can't do anything about real world problems.  Goodness, and Power, are not part of "the real world."

Political commentary on TV "non-fiction" news often states that  "Race is important to Democrats, so therefore Hillary must win the Black vote."  Or some variant on "must win the XXX vote" where XXX is whatever block of voters they are trying to trick you into thinking "are all the same."

In our new 2016 reality there can be such a thing as a "race" all voting as a Bloc.  And it's not racism to say "they" all vote the same way.

A Theme for a novel series might be rooted in the concept that the phrase "win the Black Vote" is racist.  It's based on the idea that all members of a group are identical to one another.  All the "isms" make that assumption -- good novel themes come from those unconscious verbal habits.  That gives you the "internal conflict" for your main character.

And it is objectively true - can be measured by statistics.

Why do the stats show there is a "woman's vote" and a "black vote" and a "Jewish vote?"  WHY????

Because there really IS.

How did that happen?

Maybe by forbidding kids to read the entire textbook before going to Class 1 of the course?

Or perhaps by forbidding kids in grammar school from teaching themselves and defying "the teacher" in every particular and making the teacher PROVE what they are teaching before the class, and not simply parrot what they learned in Education Classes?  Just because it's written in a book doesn't make it true. Prove it.

Teachers teaching today WERE TAUGHT that they can only do "all they can" and so 99% of them don't dare do anything beyond that.   The remaining 1% of teachers are making waves,  big time.

Authoritarian is the word for what has changed our culture.

To "depict" that Cultural Shift in a way that has verisimilitude enough to carry your reader into your artificially built world, you need to know what it was "before" -- what it was in transition -- and what it is "now" relative to your story.

Here's a clue - about reducing stress on the beleaguered victims who are "being taught" instead of learning.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/solutions-for-stressed-out-high-school-students-1455301683

Then you need to explain that change to your reader.

One great way to grasp this idea is to watch the British TV Series, Downton Abby -- that starts in a 'before' culture and depicts the shift into World War I, and the gradual rise of socialism in the UK that changed the whole class-based, landed gentry culture of the 1800's.

Note the relative ages of the characters.  The elders were raised in a before-culture -- the adults are striving to maintain it -- the children are throwing off the traces and running wild into "the future."  And all are righteous about their beliefs and attitudes..

So, in tracing the cultural shift your reader understands, look for old fiction where THE GOOD GUY WINS BECAUSE HE'S GOOD NOT BECAUSE HE'S A GUY.

A good theme might be, "There never was any sexism, and there is no such thing as a 'women's vote' and never was."  Everything in your reader's reality (and yours) says that is nonsense.  Convince the reader otherwise.  The technique known as the "twist ending" is where you suddenly "twist" the fictional reality you've invented back into something resembling the reader's everyday reality.

Look for old fiction where the difference between THE GOOD GUY and THE BAD GUY is that the good guy is GOOD and the bad guy is BAD.  No shades of gray.

Shades of gray in theme material was injected in the 1970's and 1980's as viewer's real-reality shifted from "black and white."

That pivot point in development is important to understand.   It happens so gradually that the Characters don't notice until one day they wake up and the world has changed -- they can't talk to their grandchildren anymore.  New world. New language.

Depicting that generation gap lets you give your Worldbuilding a dimension that feels like reality to the reader.  It is verisimilitude.

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

That post has a link to Part 1 -- and it's about depicting Verisimilitude.

What is good and what is bad can be a matter of thematic argument among the characters in a work, but GOODNESS always wins.

The writer's job is to show the reader (not tell!) the mechanism of reality (of the build world this character lives in) that CAUSES goodness to win.

The entire HELLENISTIC CULTURAL attitude underlies our modern USA culture -- teaching that winning is good, and that in order to win someone has to lose.

Today's school sports custom is to deny that there is such a thing as losing.  This will create a huge cultural shift, and perhaps we will see that as the current turning-18-year-olds vote.

The Hellenistic culture survives in that two-valued Aristotelian "logic" that divides the world into black and white.

Remember in the heyday of the Hellenists, the world was flat, on the back of a turtle, and if you sail to the edge you fall off.  This week, they discovered gravity waves as predicted by Einstein, when they observed two black holes colliding. This is not an either/or world, at the particle level or at the moral level.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

#WhyWritersMatter

Do you think that writers matter?  Do you think that that which writers write is more valuable (or should be considered more valuable) than "user generated content"?

If you'd like to opine, please join Authors Guild and The Writers Guild of Canada in a campaign right now online, in Tweets and comments, and in conjunction with the first Canadian Writers' Summit (June 15-19th 2016).

For the press release:
http://www.writersunion.ca/news/writers-union-canada-launches-whywritersmatter-campaign

True, the Canadian website looks like the campaign is for Canadians, but readers and writers around the world are invited to support the campaign.
http://www.writersunion.ca/why-writers-matter

Use the hashtag #WhyWritersMatter on Twitter and/or Facebook, or email your thoughts.

So far, of the published thoughts, my favorite is this quote by Emma Donoghue, author and oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Room.

"Writers are the nearest we've got so far to inventing telepathy and time travel."

All the best,
Rowena Cherry

E-Books and Libraries

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column:

Peace in Our Time

The "peace" in the title refers to the "e-book wars" that pit authors, publishers, and libraries against each other. Giant online booksellers such as Amazon come into the equation, too. I'm not sure I understand the practical details of Doctorow's plan for authors to retail their own books, but I definitely agree (judging from the numbers cited in this article) that publishers are currently ripping off libraries with exorbitant e-book prices. And I didn't know that the Overdrive system was imposed on libraries by publishers.

My personal experience of borrowing an e-book from our local library through Overdrive involved a monumental tome, PAUL AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF GOD, by N. T. Wright, my favorite New Testament scholar. Like most academic-level publications, the book is priced beyond the usual budget of a casual reader. To read it for free from the library, I had a long wait because our county system owns only one "copy" of this volume. Now I know the probable reason for this bottleneck—the library's cost of "buying" from the publisher the right to lend multiple "copies."

Doctorow's article contains lots of information new to me. Interesting discussion even if you don't completely agree with his proposals.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 13 Authority, Responsibility, and Power in Alien Romance

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration

Part 13

Authority, Responsibility, and Power in Alien Romance
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Here is the index to the Theme-Worldbuilding Series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

Mostly, we don’t expect a theme about “Power” (not electrical, but social) in Romance Novels. “Power” themes today trend toward the dark, very dark fantasy, and major battles against Evil by characters who have “super powers.”

There may be a love story — in fact a love story is obligatory in most adventure fantasy and supernatural battles.

Character is most clearly depicted via a loved-one, if not a “Romance” per se, then family, or buddy loyalty.  You know a person by the company they keep.  In fiction, though not so much in life itself which is more murky than fiction, the viewpoint Character’s is reflected clearly in the surrounding characters.

Thus a bully will surround him/herself with yes-men, and just throw their ‘weight’ around and punish the non-compliant.

That is seen by most readers as an abuse of power, if the bully has ‘power’ (e.g. is the office boss, the parent of a child who may be an adult, a teacher who dishes out bad grades for insolence).

Character can be reflected in friends, lovers, and family members as an opposite, or as an image.  For example, a viewpoint character may surround himself or herself with people who he/she admires, looks up to, or wants to emulate, without understanding that they see themselves in him/her.  Friends stick around when they see themselves in you.  Role models adopt you into their circle because they see the quality they most admire in themselves nascent within you.

Romance blinds a Character to flaws, but reveals the virtues that first create affinity.  Soul Mates have flaws and virtues that fit together like two sides of velcro strips.

Here is an index posts to series on developing Character.

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

“Authority” is both a position in the social world you are building from your character’s innate traits, and also an innate trait of the character.

“Authority” is an attribute of what we often term the Alpha Male or Alpha Female.  As a young Alpha has to fight to rise in the pack, to learn by experience how to acquire and wield Authority, so do all humans who have that trait.

In fact, most humans have the Authority trait, but it is often recessive or undeveloped.  We have the classic tale of the lowly Private in the army detachment whose officers are all killed, and who then “rises to the occasion” and pulls off the mission successfully, maybe recruiting natives from the surroundings to help.

An experience like that makes a boy leave home and return as a man.  It works for both human genders.

Not every human with Power has a well developed Authority trait.  The result of that disparity is the classic Bully who wields Power to serve his/her inner emotional needs.

Among humans Authority is an innate trait, not something that is “handed to you.”  So we have the phrase, “promoted over his head,” or “out of his league.”  You can hand a person with an undeveloped Authority trait a job that bestows Authority upon them, but that just won’t  hand them “Authority.”  If they don’t turn into a Bully, they become a Patsy for their underlings.

So you get the Plot Situation where some disaster happens, and the Character in position of Authority blames an underling.  Mere office holding or titles does not develop Authority and often unleashes wild abuses of Power that result in disasters the office holder blames on the unexpected misbehavior of others.

A Character with the trait of “Powerful” (in Astrology, that’s Mars and Pluto) who gains a position of Authority without stepwise development of Power and Authority inner traits, will not know how to “take responsibility” for the consequences of their actions or inactions.

We saw that in February 2016 in the Revival of the TV Series X-Files, where Scully’s mother dies and she realizes that giving away her baby has far reaching consequences for which she is responsible.  It is a very good script that gradually unfolds the issue of Responsibility for unforeseeable consequences.

In the case of giving up that baby (because they lived a life of incredible danger in a confusing world of the supernatural or alien threats), they made a choice and at this point in maturity, Scully is feeling the weight of Responsibility (in Astrology, Responsibility is Saturn and Capricorn).  Her mother died feeling that weight.

As I said above, sometimes Parents are bullies.  Our laws give the parents Authority over the children - (today that is vitiated by Child Protective Services, but it is still an awesome Authority) whether the parent has a well developed Authority trait or not.  Because of child protection laws, parents have Authority but not Power, and sometimes not even Responsibility.

This trend of society structuring law to separate Authority and Responsibility by shifting the Power centers is not a “human” thing, but a current social trend.  It may be an improvement, but Ancient Wisdom says it is not.  In fact recent wisdom says you can’t separate Authority and Responsibility, and that is a principle behind most of the laws in the USA.

When you have the Power and Authority to drive a car, (most 10 year olds CAN drive most cars, but don’t have Authority of a license), you then have the Responsibility for the consequences created when that car moves under your command.  Since the potential consequences far outstrip individual ability to pay the price, we invented liability insurance.

So, in traditional law, we have a fusion of Authority and Responsibility for the use and abuse of Power.  In modern social laws, we have the Power of society driving a wedge between fused elements.  This could easily be viewed with creeping horror by an Alien in love with a Human.

Human irrationality might be horrifying to Aliens - but on the other hand what we consider to be rational might actually be the source of horror.

For example, the Abortion controversy.  We are trying to craft laws which fuse Power (the choice to have an abortion and then actually do it) and Responsibility (the responsibility to bear the child and give it up for adoption or raise it).  We do this by giving the pregnant woman Authority (license) to decide if that fetus will develop.

So we examine the social origins of customs both for and against raping a woman and forcing her to bear the child.

Several TV Series have dealt with human-alien hybrids.  With Spock, on Star Trek, we see that creating a living human/Vulcan hybrid was “the logical thing to do.”  With the Tenctonese on Alien Nation ...

...we see it is more complicated.  Perhaps most fascinating is the situation in the film Enemy Mine ...

...where an alien pregnancy is triggered by emotional affinity with a human, and the human takes responsibility for introducing the resulting child to the Alien home world’s genealogy — to give that child an Identity.

So we see that to Build a World for a human/alien Romance, you must deal with Questions of Ultimate Concern, such as what is life, what is death, (in a Paranormal Romance, a ghost might love a living person), what is reality and what is fantasy?  What is reality and how it differs from fantasy pivots on the question of what is humanity?

Belief enters into the defining of Character motivations, which depicts that velcro that glues Characters in a Romance.



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

What choices a writer makes when defining the fictional Society’s beliefs, and the fictional Character’s beliefs, defines the intended audience.  Here are some posts on targeting audiences.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/05/index-to-marketing-fiction-in-changing.html

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

When building your Alien’s reproductive physiology, you weave your Theme into the non-verbalized assumptions your aliens make about Life, The Universe and Everything — about matters of ultimate concern.

Remember, since your readers are contemporary humans, the alien has to be comprehensible to them (or so alien there is no comprehending).  So you have to start with your reader’s surrounding world.

For example, the arguments for and against Abortion hinge on the definition of when “life” begins.

We have very little “science” behind our beliefs, despite the extensive research on genetics.

So religion figures into the belief end of the spectrum, and science presents a lot of data that can be interpreted according to those beliefs, or against those beliefs.

Historically, on earth among humans, it has not always been assumed that science (natural reality) contradicts religion so adamantly that an individual person must choose one over the other, but never both.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/02/09/bible-and-science-ultimate-power-couple.html

Note that article is from Fox News and is on their Opinion page, and is mostly about a book recently published, so don’t expect much but do glance through it. It’s not about abortion, but a pitch to buy a book.

"Amazing Truths: How Science and the Bible Agree" (HarperCollins)



As presented in the opinion article, the idea that there’s no inherent conflict between the Bible and Science is not new, or surprising — but it is quite “alien” enough for you to build your Alien’s world around it.

A being from such a world would look at our contemporary American culture, fractured into opposing camps over a non-existent issue, as one might view insane asylum inmates — whose opinions don’t count.

In a Romance Novel, the fog of Romance (Astrologically Neptune) would blot out awareness by the alien that the human is so non-sane that her opinion doesn’t count — and the human would be unaware that she was marrying an individual to whom her opinions are insane and thus not important enough to listen to.

The writer creates suspense and a leery fascination in the reader by salting bits and clues to when and where that mis-match in respect will surface and create a plot turning point.

Abortion is not the only example you can use this way, but it is a handy example we’re all familiar with.  Death and the existence (or lack thereof) of Ghosts is another such issue.  Cryogenic freezing for revival later (does the soul rejoin the awakened body?) Or Dr. McCoy’s famous aversion to Star Trek’s transporter scrambling his molecules is another.  Cloning — do clones have souls?  Artificial Intelligence? Do robots have legal rights? One famous court case is trying to establish personhood legal rights for a monkey.  And climate change - never forget the elephant in the room.

So the issues at the juncture of science and religion abound, but let’s just work with Abortion, and then you can duplicate the process with other issues that can make thematic stumbling blocks for your Characters.

Underneath the issue of Abortion are the following thematic issues:

A) Law: what is law and what should it govern?  Who gets to make it and who gets to say what it means? (It used to be that all judges were male, remember?)
B) What is Life? When does life begin?  Where exactly does Life begin? To what purpose and what end?
C) All living things die, so what difference does it make when?  Better not to live than to be an “unwanted child” hated by parents.
D) What, exactly, is a human being? In Alien Romance novels, this is a crucial question and it is integral to the Worldbuilding.

To answer these questions, you need to have a good idea of what your target readership thinks, what they believe, and what they think they believe.

Remember, with humans what a person thinks is not necessarily correlated with what they believe or think they believe. This is a trait that can drive an Alien to distraction, or repel any bonding with humans.

The essence of story is conflict.  The writer has to articulate the conflict and underlying theme in order to encode that information in symbolism so the reader does not have to articulate it.  Here's part 4 of a series on symbolism with links to previous posts.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/01/theme-symbolism-integration-part-4-how.html

A disparity between thinking (science) and believing (religion) can be a wonderfully dramatic conflict, so I included that opinion article from Fox News above to give you some ideas.

Also remember that humans can believe in science to the point where science becomes their religion.

Religion has elements of Neptune.  The “organized” part has more to do with Saturn, which is also one of the signifiers of science.

A) Alien law might not be based on anything resembling the Code of Hammurabi or anything resembling the Magna Carta. Those two works along with the Bible are huge ingredients in the laws of the U.S.A. that we take for granted.

B) Aliens would have to understand “life” somewhat similarly to the way your reader does if there is to be a Romance — the the aliens might have enemies or trading allies out there somewhere who don’t understand “life” as we do (rock-creatures; crystalline creatures?)

C) Aliens of a hive mind or inherited memory (or who eat the dead to acquire their memories and experiences?) might have a different idea of the value of an individual’s life. In a Romance, “I love you” generally means I place the value of your continued life above the value of my own. I’d die for you.  Aliens might turn their backs and walk away leaving the beloved to die alone, and then be puzzled why the human strong enough to survive would no longer be interested in this Romantic Relationship.

D) What constitutes “Being Human” in your Worldbuilding will very precisely determine the potential audience for your work.  You pretty much define your audience by choosing a definition of what, exactly, is the trait that makes us human.

That trait of defined humanity is the one thing the human and the alien in an Alien Romance have in common, and the reader has to be able to see it.

The reader has to be able to divine what he sees in her and what she sees in him, despite all the conflicts and disparities.

For many, the point of reading Alien Romance is to grasp the essence of an idea of what the defining trait of Human is.  We read fiction to gather and “grok” (internalize beneath the verbal level of knowledge) various intangible concepts about life.  Alien Romance specifically pivots on this one thematic point woven so deep inside the world building that the reader doesn’t even notice it is there.

Those unnoticed elements of theme coded into the world building, welded and integrated beneath the story, beneath Character, beneath conflict, underneath it all, are the elements that cause readers to memorize your byline and search for more of your books, while recommending them on Facebook.

So let’s do an example of Abortion.  And we have a human woman pregnant by an alien somehow wafted into that alien’s world, leaving Earth so far behind there is no going back.

That was the Situation the movie STAR MAN ...

...avoided by leaving the human woman pregnant on Earth, and leaving some instructional devices for the boy as he grew up.

So let’s say our pregnant woman is out there among the aliens.

Why would she want an abortion?
a) it is a monster or might be?
b) this pregnancy is making her deathly ill
c) the alien genes are altering her body,
d) her alien has (apparently) abandoned her and she has no income
e) she wants to go home to Earth and this kid would be bullied and rejected there,
f) Alien medicine won’t be able to deliver this monster baby
g) Alien culture will rip the child from her and put it in a zoo display or study it to learn how to conquer Earth
h) If she raises the kid well, the Aliens will use it to invade and conquer Earth.
i) let your imagination roam — the reasons are infinite

Why would the Aliens reject the concept of abortion, no matter her (reasonable) reasons?

1) Life begins at conception
2) Humanity, thus what we term Human Rights, begin at conception
3) Her death is of no consequence, but the life she bears is portentous
4) Human genes are so faulty, the alterations the fetus is making in her are an improvement
5) Poverty is a noble condition - or she can seek protection from father’s family
6) Nobody knows where Earth is for sure
7) If she dies, good riddance
8) If they get a monster for their zoo, it’ll be a tourist draw and make money
9) Or they get a half-human to use as leverage to conquer or enslave Earth

To choose one of those plot options, or invent a new one, you have to have a philosophical model of the actual origin of human life.  It doesn’t matter so much if you get the correct model. It matters that throughout the book or series of books, you keep everything in the world building from the style of the furniture, the position and shape of windows, the existence of a drug-underculture, the agricultural methods, everything must be consistent with your assigned philosophical model.

Also remember, if you’re inventing an entire planet of aliens, they are most likely not mono-cultural, and even within a culture there will be groups that operate on a contrasting assumption about what constitutes “human” life, or personhood’

For example, suppose your human/alien couple have determined they are Soul Mates despite the physiological differences.

This pre-supposes that The Soul is real, and both humans and aliens have the property Soul.

The fact of your built world may not allow for Souls, but the culture of some of the Aliens might.

So suppose your Aliens believe in the existence of an Immortal Soul — but maybe not for everyone.  Maybe their theory says there is no way to distinguish an individual with a Soul from one without a Soul, not even by behavior.

What if their theory is that when the egg cell and sperm cell (or equivalent) are separate in the adult bodies, they are in fact living cells, imbued with the Soul of the person whose body they exist within (if that individual has a Soul).

In other words, “life” begins before conception.  Life began whenever living cells first developed on that planet, or in space, or whatever their theory (you, the writer need to know, but the reader does not.)

Life doesn’t “begin” at conception.  Life began at the origin of Life.

What begins at conception is the attribute that Terrans call humanity and the aliens call whatever they call themselves.

You have to decide if your aliens have Individuals or are a hive-mind, or inherited memory, or some other structure to their physiology.  Let’s assume they regard Individuality as a trait inseparable from Humanity.  That is, at conception, what begins is Individuality.  What begins at conception is uniqueness.

If your aliens have a hive-mind or some other grouping physiology, individuals would not be the unique element, but the Group or Hive would have that uniqueness stamp, and all the animal-bodies of that hive would be of a single Soul.

A hive, on the one hand would regard individuals as disposable, and on the other hand regard pre-hatched or pre-born individuals as more valuable than old, used up individuals. Thus a hive might view the concept of abortion as anathema because it threatens the continuity of the hive,

So, if you are depicting a human-alien Romance between Soul Mates, and the aliens believe that the Soul becomes welded inextricably to the body the instant a zygote forms from two cells, you can pose a wrenching question to your readers about Authority, Responsibility and Power with a Plot involving the abortion of a hybrid fetus.

Note, we’ve addressed Authority, Responsibility and Power — but not yet added in “Rights.”

These days, we’re dealing with such questions as the rights of the pregnant mother, the rights of the fetus, the rights of the father, the rights of society, the dominance of religion in authority over women via government and law, and many more issues of how Reality is structured,

We use science to try to sort out the underlying structure of the universe, and we’ve pretty much discarded Religion as a tool for dissecting reality.

By addressing these current events issues via Alien Romance, you can isolate and simplify the knotty philosophy well enough to depict the essence of the issue.

The essence of the issue of Abortion pivots on the existence of a Soul and the point in development when the Soul can be harmed by abortion.  One extant theory I’ve mentioned before is the idea that the Soul enters manifestation through the dimension of Time.  And we also know there’s a connection between Time, Space, and Gravity, but we don’t know exactly what that connection is. We have the Higgs Boson and are in hot pursuit of Gravity Waves. Aliens would know about these things (if they have an interstellar drive), and their Religion would probably assign some interaction between Time and the Soul — possibly connected to Gravity Waves and some Interstellar Drive.

I played with that idea a little in the novel DREAMSPY, ...

...but left out the Divine Dimension.

It gets even more complicated if you postulate God orchestrating the conception, birth and destiny of the Soul’s Journey through Life. When you build God into your fictional world, you add dimensions most people don’t want to deal with in fiction.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Review of "Half The World" (Shattered Sea #2) by Joe Abercrombie.

Half way into "Half The World", it struck me that this book reminds me of "Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers" with Eowen's story folded into it. With bodily functions.

Not that I hadn't noticed the Eowen theme since page 34, if not before, when she meets her equivalent of the Lord of the Nazgul. The "no living man..." meme or trope was repeated rather too many times, and if I hadn't enjoyed the "thusness" and complexity of "Half A King" (Shattered Sea #1), I might have set the book aside, assuming that I knew the ending. I'm glad I kept reading.

From the set up, I half expected that eventually the warrior heroine Thorn Bathu would fight the very formidable Grom-Gil-Gorn (a Gilgamesh-like figure, who built the walls of Uruk... what fun to play word associations!) like Legolas fighting the Oliphaunt, on a smaller scale.

By the way, Mariah Huehner's "'I Am No Man' Doesn't Cut It" is an excellent commentary on the difference between the Eowen of the book and the Eowen of the movie. http://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/ I looked it up after reaching my own conclusions, and was very taken by analysis.

Bottom line, if you loved Eowen, you'll probably like Thorn Bathu. Thorn begins her journey by fighting three boys (and being judged to have not only failed the unequal test, but sentenced to death when her battle is most unpleasantly interrupted), and she progressively fights more and more men simultaneously. To fight one invincible warrior seems almost an anticlimax after some of her adventures.

The backstory of the elves is built upon in this middle book in the series, with elf relics playing a bigger role. What kind of elves, though, toted shotguns? I have to read "Half A War" to find out if I'm right. I also want to know how Yarvi gets to kill Grandmother Wexen.  As with a Romance, which this is not although there are romantic elements, the greatest interest is the How, not the What or the Why.

The bad faith diplomacy and cut-throat intrigue of the courts of the various high and low Kings, Queens, and of the Empress of the South is highly entertaining. Father Yarvi, the Minister is very like the Queen (or Grand Vizier) in a game of chess, and his uncle, King Uthil (who was "Nobody" in the first book in the Shattered Sea series) is a surprisingly limited mover... like Theoden. In this book, Yarvi seems older, and nicer, but of course, he is mostly seen through the narration of his two pawns, Thorn Bathu and the muscular and morally courageous Brand, and one must remember that Yarvi is "a deep-cunning man." In a complex and complicated series such as this, one should never underestimate the unreliability of a young and unsophisticated POV narrator, especially when it is a virtuous teenager.

All the same, I think that Brand will have to be killed off in the next book. He knows too much. Father Yarvi tells him too much.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry

The Death of the Midlist

A blog by horror author Brian Keene offering the most thorough explanation I've seen lately about the root causes of the death of the midlist:

How the Mid-List Died

In brief, he blames "corporate stupidity" and changes in publishing. His overview gives an interesting brief history of those changes. He doesn't mention one other source of the problem, alterations in tax laws that made it more expensive for publishers to store large inventories of backlist books.

He discusses the importance of an author's having books available through online sales, independent bookstores, and what's left of the nationwide chains (if possible). That said, he pessimistically expects Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million eventually to go extinct as Borders and Waldenbooks did.

Here's Keene's follow-up essay on the practical aspects of diversifying as an author:

Making a Living in a Post-Mid-List World

Again he emphasizes the need to avoid putting all one's creative eggs in the same publishing basket. No longer can a non-bestseller expect to earn a living wage by writing for one or two publishers, as Keene did at the beginning of his career.

He mentions that he started getting published twenty years ago; from this bit of data, I infer that he's younger than I am. When my first book was published (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth), I broke into the mass-market paperback realm by selling an anthology of vampire stories, CURSE OF THE UNDEAD (you can find cheap used copies on Amazon), to Fawcett. In my early twenties, with no professional publication or editing track record whatever, I got a contract to edit an anthology—a type of book nowadays considered a very hard sell—for a major genre publisher. Not only that, I received an advance (in 1970 dollars) almost half as large as the one Harlequin paid me (in 2005 dollars) for my only mass-market novel, vampire romance EMBRACING DARKNESS (still available as an e-book).

Verily, the past is a different country.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World Part 18 Amazon Makes Some Bad Marketing Decisions

Marketing Fiction in a Changing World
 Part 18
 Amazon Makes Some Bad Marketing Decisions
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Amazon has a rule against writers "reviewing" books by other writers.

I'm an Amazon Vine reviewer, and a writer, and of course I know a lot of writers on Facebook, Twitter, etc. It's almost impossible for me to read a book by anyone who isn't a friend, friend of a friend, member of one or another writer's group -- somehow connected online.

Amazon's snoops can find those connections.

So they assume I'm just shilling for my friends' books.

Well, a lot of beginning, self-publishing writers do get their friends to post 5-star reviews, so they can amass 500 5-star reviews to brag about.

But guess what? If you know a person and are friends with them, if you LIKE a person, chances are very good you will indeed like the books or stories they write -- even if they aren't very well written, but just great stories that thrill your bones.

That is the nature of fiction. Fiction transmits from the subconscious of the writer to the subconscious of the reader -- when there is some sort of harmony of the notes between you, you LIKE each other's fiction.

I've spent a lot of time on this Alien Romance blog talking about writing craft, and how the writers' perspective on "headlines" and especially politics, and social movements, is vastly different from the perspective someone just living in our civilization experiences.

Writers see the universe as differently as Graphic artists do.

Writers experience reading fiction differently than non-writers do.'

You know you're a writer when you have lost all enjoyment from reading books, and then all of a sudden find yourself enjoying books again, but seeing something totally different.

Writers enjoy well crafted stories that shine with artistic brilliance.

Non-writers never get to experience that brilliance full on.

CAUTION: there are people, readers, who have never written or never published a story, who are nevertheless writers in this sense. They see, and revel in, the technical craftsmanship of novels.  Many such people end up working as editors. Even more are professional reviewers, librarians, teachers, and personal friends with lots of published writers.

So production of stories in text format is not the criterion I use, but it is the criterion that Amazon seems to use to purge the comments on a novel of any really useful information you might want before you buy a book.

If you're a professional writer, editor, publisher, etc. Amazon doesn't want you to inform the public about the brilliance or the flaws in a work someone might want to buy.'

But as it happens, the ONLY people capable of both enjoying a friend's works and judging that work objectively enough to inform a general reader are the very people Amazon prohibits from performing that service.'

In other words, Amazon has made a very bad marketing decision.

On the other hand, Amazon does own Goodreads.com, where writers and readers can interact.

So there is method to their madness, but it does not serve the general fiction reader browsing for something to read.

One of the most informative bits of information a prospective book buyer can have is a list of which other writers this new writer is friends with.  Who hangs out with whom.  Which new writers have been inspired by the writers you grew up loving most?

The generational hand-off of traditions in writing is one thing Librarians taught me to look for, when I was learning to browse a public library.

So today, I'm giving you a book series by a writing student I started on a long and varied career who is now garnering top awards attention.

Here is what I wrote on Facebook (back in February 2016) about the third book in his award winning series:

---------quote-------
Here is Book 3 in a Series that is garnering vast amounts of Award attention, and with good reason. It's about a human polymath from Earth who because of a labyrinth of political machinations ends up leading a First Contact and First Deep Contact mission into a well populated (and war-torn) Galaxy.

The worldbuilding is detailed, the space-war-armament development superlative, the aliens suitably strange and amazing (and mysterious), and I'm smitten with the portrayal of a polymath at work. Anything more I might say could be "spoilers" for some, so take a good look at this novel and dive right in. It's easily readable even if you haven't read the previous ones.

This series is getting Nebula attention. In some ways it reminds me of Cj Cherryh 's galaxy-building visions, or Janeen O'Kerry - in fact the galactic history building in Janeen's series on THE SALIK WARS and THEIRS NOT TO REASON WHY is similar, though Janeen is known for her Romance novels.

I can only wonder if Robert J. Sawyer has read this whole series. In a way, the concept reminds me of Jack McDevitt with overtones of Jack Campbell Taylor Anderson - Author of The Destroyermen carrying on in the tradition of Keith Laumer and Poul Anderson.

So far the series is not a Romance, and does not feature a Love Story -- BUT Caine as a character is one grand hunk, and like Spock will become a focus for many Romance style stories.

http://www.amazon.com/Raising-Caine-Riordan-Charles-Gannon/dp/1476780935/

---------end quote----
You will note that is Book 3 -- there is a 4th coming soon -- and if you have been following my series on Worldbuilding, you will find the Caine Riordan series extremely interesting.

Now, to an example of what kind of information Amazon wants to deprive shoppers of.

Here below is a comment made on Facebook by Charles Gannon after reading the anthology of stories written by writers other than Jean Lorrah and I -- contributing new characters and new angles to the Sime~Gen Universe.

Here is the book I gave him a copy of in exchange for a copy of his Raising Caine --- a common practice among writers, severely frowned upon by Amazon.



---------from Charles E. Gannon --------
If you are a fan of series and universes that unfold themselves over the course of multiple books and stories, creating a world in which you get immersed, then you need to be aware of this if you are not already:

The Sime-Gen series launched by Jacqueline Lichtenberg. Intrigue, exploration, adventure, house politics, and under it all, much larger, lurking questions of where different societies are able to find synergy--and where they are likely to tumble into devastating conflict.

Does this sound like a paid-for advertisement? Well, in one sense it is...because, you see, I have a debt to (gladly, joyously) repay that I will never be done repaying: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, for reasons I will never fully understand, took me under her writing wing when I was 12 years old. The attention and enthusiasm she lavished on those early efforts of mine was nothing short of Herculean. In a file cabinet not more than 25 yards from where I sit writing this, I have her first 7 pg (single space, Corolla type-written) critique of a story that was, maybe, about 80 % as long as her critique.

I knew at that moment what good fortune had descended upon me in the form of her mentorship. Or so I thought: until you actually are working in this field, you cannot fully appreciate the way a good mentor's initial lessons keep paying dividends, kept showing up to guide you like a footman's lantern down the better path.

It was also only later on that I fully realized what an extraordinary craftsperson she is, and how far-sighted her vision was of attempting to tell a story across a variety of media, over time: an exercise in world-building that preceded the gaming industry's discovery of just how many ways you can sell world-expansion and development products that create a total narrative in which the once-focal adventure products become small specific events that subtly push the warp and woof of the much bigger world-tapestry that has been created.

So, as advertisements go, this one sucks. It's too long, too personal, too gushing...yeah. I know all that. I worked in advertising. But you won't forget it--and that's the point. Because until you go and see what I'm talking about in the form of Jacqueline's extraordinary Sime-Gen saga, you won't know the extraordinary voice and vision that gave rise to this long paean of praise.

So: go here--and find out what I'm talking about.

http://amazon.com/author/jacquelinelichtenberg

And here's the Amazon page that is your gateway into this incredible world:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=sime%2Fgen&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=75077217077&hvpos=1t1&hvexid&hvnetw=g&hvrand=446465704877823808&hvpone&hvptwo&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_5unxioq485_b

The newest entry in the Sime-Gen series Fear and Courage is at the bottom of the page, and features some of the other many persons who Jacqueline has mentored, who have brought the voices she helped them find and refine back to this wonderful world in order to expand it even more.

Don't miss out.

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

So you see, tracing the connections among writers can give you an amazing amount of information about whether you will enjoy a book or not -- all having little or nothing to do with the blurb on the book, the content, story description, spoilers, or other readers saying "I liked it" or "It was a page-turner."

As a beginning writer, cultivate connections with writers whose work you admire.  I learned from the generation previous to me. It is a long-long tradition going back to cave dwelling days and stories around camp fires.  We are bards.

Here is a permalink to Chuck's post on Facebook.  Glance through the comments for mentions of other writers his fans read.

https://www.facebook.com/chuck.gannon.01/posts/10205509232271667/

And here is a permalink to my Facebook post about RAISING CAINE so you can see the comments there.

https://www.facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg/posts/10153341607837548/

It turns out I made a mistake picking names from the FB dropdown, and Janeen O'Kerry corrected me, adding Jean Johnson to the list of writers you should check out.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Oh, Arrgh and Blasty!

There's a new service on the horizon to help authors locate and scupper pirate links on Google. It's in Beta, so is free to the patient and those willing to provide feedback... and to the impatient for a fee of $19.99.

It's Blasty.co
Note, it is dot co , not dot com!   
https://www.blasty.co/invitation/wr4dTA9d

So far, I am impressed. When I applied, I was asked to name one of my titles, and to give my author name. Once I was accepted, I was allowed to create a password, upload my covers, add the rest of my titles, and to start "Blasting" copyright infringing search results on Google.

The site only works with Google Chrome. One can apply without using Chrome, but the findings and the choice whether to Blast any given link or whitelist it only work in Chrome.  I am not clear whether the service actually sends a takedown to the hosting site, or only to Google so this service might be a supplement to a service such as Muso.com or DMCAForce 

However, even if it removes Google search results, that makes it harder for most pirates to be found by "valuable traffic" and to make money off other people's works without paying them. Many of the links go to sites that are obviously hosted overseas, and that have no intention of honoring the DMCA in any case. Some post the legal blurb that they are required to post, and warn copyright owners of severe penalties for sending a DMCA notice in error.

Many post a cover and some blurb and big "DOWNLOAD" links. Authors should understand that they only have to have a "good faith belief". The DMCA does not require that authors download malware or infringe other people's copyrights (where multiple ebooks are hosted in one place) in order to suspect that their ebooks are being published and distributed in violation of their rights.  There are scam sites that probably don't have any ebooks at all, but hope that people who know they are behaving immorally if not illegally will provide credit card information to "subscribe", or else will download ransomware in hopes of a free read of something erotica.

(If you look closely at the blurry pages sites that purport to have a certain title, you may see a tiny disclaimer that they may not have that title, but will have something related and equally interesting.)

Surprisingly, some Google results are .pdfs that are pages of live links to where ebooks may or may not be hosted.  Anyone trying this service will have to take the time to look at all the results before taking the decision whether to Blast, to WhiteList or to leave it for later.

So far, I've Blasted 54 links, and although one cannot believe the copyright infringing sites' boasts about how many happy people have downloaded each book, it looks like I could have lost tens of thousands of potential sales (which, if on Amazon, might have resulted in tens of thousands of returns, to!!!).

My bottom line: after trying this new service for four days, I am inclined to heartily recommend it.  I would suggest, though, that if any alien romance authors (or authors from any other genre, but I like to hit my metadata!!!) that you copy and paste the urls you find suspicious and email them to yourself , because once they are gone from Google, you might want to see if they are still on Bing and Dogpile and the other search engines. Or, you might want to send DMCAs to some of them.

Happy hunting,

Rowena Cherry

Real-Life "Superpowers"

Here are three lists of real-life extraordinary human anomalies from the "Cracked" website:

DNA Mutations That Make Ordinary People X-Men

Personally, I wouldn't classify genes for adventurousness and happiness as superpowers, simply normal variations. The Argentinians who have a supernormal tolerance for arsenic and the Inuit who process dietary fats differently from the rest of us, though, strike me as bona-fide extraordinary.

A sample of abilities everybody has in infancy but loses as he or she grows up:

5 Superpowers We All Had as Babies

A recurring theme of these infant "powers" is that growth requires pruning and focusing so that some abilities get lost as a necessary part of adjustment to the needs of adult life. For instance, pre-verbal babies can hear and produce all the sounds possible to the human vocal apparatus; when they learn to talk, however, they "forget" how to process the sounds their native language doesn't use. Reminds me of the scene in MARY POPPINS where we're told all babies understand the language of birds, yet as they learn human speech, they lose that gift.

How about a man who can touch live wires with impunity because he has seven to eight times greater resistance to electricity than the average person? Or the autistic savant with perfect visual memory, who can draw a whole city in accurate detail after seeing it once? The man who can control his autonomic body functions so well he can sit almost naked on ice without freezing and the man with reflexes faster than the human eye can follow also fit credibly into the "superpower" category:

6 Real People with Superpowers

If the environment changed radically enough in some distant future era, could one of these traits become so important to survival that it spread widely through the population, making individuals who carried that gene an elite group? In the back story of Tanith Lee's SABELLA, a human-like species evolved a form of gender dimorphism in which women fed on the blood of their mates, so that the population could survive dire, long-term food scarcity. How great a change in the environment would be required to generate alterations in human biology this extreme? Or the tendril-bearing, telepathic mutants of A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN or the Simes and Gens of Jacqueline's far-future Earth?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration Part 12: What Makes Evil Seductive? by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Worldbuilding Integration
Part 12
What Makes Evil Seductive?

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Is existence, all human experience, the condition of being human, a battle between "Good" and "Evil?"

Of such abstract questions are High Concept themes composed.

A writer is generally a writer because a born writer just can't not-write!

Writing, per se, is seductive.

But we still must somehow "make a living."  So it is with great trepidation that most of us realize that what we write is of no real use or interest to anyone else. What a bummer!

Still, life is not so terrible for born writers, provided one little trick is firmly mastered early in life.

The trick? REWRITING.

There are at least 4 Types of Writers (and any given person may morph from one to another throughout life).

TYPE A:  Isaac Asimov is a prime example. This type writes and sells "first drafts." Many beginners think that if their first drafts are not sell-able, then they "can't write."  But that's not true. It's just that they aren't TYPE A writers.  There are very few TYPE A writers working professionally in writing. Most of them are Journalists. Remember Asimov wrote mostly non-fiction best sellers.

TYPE B: Many more writers do their first drafts in their mind, then rewrite and refine it all mentally.  Eventually, they just type it up.  To an observer it all looks remarkably easy. When asked how they write such best selling material, they have no idea how to explain it.  This type of writer can't figure out what beginners don't know.

TYPE C: An even more populous category of writers first-draft mentally, then rewrite and refine by telling the story verbally to other people.  I've known a few who did that, but I am generally of a type.  Most of the Type C writers I know personally never publish.

TYPE D: The most populated category is the work-a-day writer who writes a first draft for personal satisfaction, then stores that in the proverbial bottom drawer and hammers out a sellable version of the story through the process known as drafting, or rewriting.

All of Type D's rewriting efforts that we will discuss today are done long before an agent or editor ever sees the manuscript. Much of the re-drafting is done before Beta Readers see any of it (or hear of it). Then Beta Reader input is digested and incorporated, producing more drafts.  Finally, after submission and acceptance, comes more drafting to hammer the work into shape for the specific publisher's existing market.

Here is a series of posts detailing exactly what an editor's job is from the point of view of a writer trying to appear professional.

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

Part VII contains links to previous parts.

So what has the type of writer you are got to do with What Makes Evil Seductive?

Well, types A, B, and C either already know or don't want to know.

It's Type D writers who have to learn, know, observe, dissect, analyze, and understand such abstract ideas that compose the core material of a theme.

When writing for yourself, for personal satisfaction, to craft a story about an interesting person, you don't have to SHOW DON'T TELL, illustrate or dramatize the utterly abstract notion of Good or Evil, or even the conflict between them.

You don't need a theory of Good and Evil - what they are, where they came from, which side your protagonist is on, which side wins, - or any conscious statement of these abstract, underlying principles of Creation.

You don't need religion. You don't even need to know if you have a Religion, never mind what your Religion is.

You just write your story, and it is yours.

But if you intend to monetize the time spent writing, rather than just tossing it away as "recreational," then as a Type D writer,  you will have to think hard about abstractions.

There are 3 things to study separately before combining them into a coherent Worldbuilding exercise based on a cleanly stated Theme so you can show-don't-tell how your Characters' World is fully integrated with your Theme.

If these 3 things are clear in your mind when you begin a rewrite,  you will be able to convey the Unity of  your World and your Theme in one, penetrating, unforgettable, quotable scene.

1) What your intended audience assumes about the nature of Good, Evil and how they conflict.

2) What you assume about the nature of Good, Evil, and how they conflict.

3) What your Characters assume ab out the nature of Good, Evil, and how they conflict.

Here's one example about what audiences assume:

"The Good Guys Win Because They Are Good."

That's an envelope theme, and can be broken out into thousands of more specific themes, such as Love Conquers All.

Yes, Love Conquers All is a thematic statement about the nature of Reality -- it is made concrete by assigning the value "Love" to the initial variable "Good Guys."

To be a "Good Guy/Gal" the Character must be
a) capable of love,
b) using that capability when we first meet the Character (saving the cat), and
c) losing at first, taking it well, coming back in middle, hitting his stride at the 3/4 point, and winning in the end.

In our culture, "Winner" = "Good"

Being enamored of the romance genre novel, we generally tend to be seduced by Love.

Romance is the hint of the hope of love.  Romance seduces even the most wayward Character into Love.

We live in a world where Love = Good = Winner.  And Love starts with Romance, the quick double-take, the captured attention, the incessant obsession, the surrender to Love.

So, if the Romance Genre Novel is all about Love,
about Good,
about being good or becoming good,
about falling in love with "The Good Guy" who is the Winner-Guy (big, strong, hunk, powerful protector),
then why is the Bad Boy Romance so seductive?

Why do we drool over an unshaven, torn jeans, tough-guy biker running from the law?

Why is Darth Vader so popular?  Why are there so many Evil Guy costumes at ComicCon?

Why did the Vampire Romance explode so fast big three publishers had to invent spine-symbols for those books on the Romance shelves? Most Vampires in Vampire Romance were pretty good Good Guys, or struggling to be so. Remember the TV Series Forever Knight and that hot romance with a woman Coroner?

Or conversely, why is Cozy Romance so popular?

If "Winner" = "Good" does that mean "Loser" = "Bad" ?

What makes Evil seductive?

Today, the genre tropes and tastes, even the sub-genre names and symbols have shifted to market to a new generation.

Today, the Fantasy Genre is churning out, in books, TV and film, endless variations on Worlds  built around "Meta-Humans" or other mutations, some from parallel universes, some with "magical powers."

One such example is the TV Series The Magicians.

"The Magicians" stars Jason Ralph ("A Most Violent Year," "Aquarius") as Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant grad student who enrolls in Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, a secret upstate New York university specializing in magic.

http://www.amazon.com/Unauthorized-Magic/dp/B019GFGXA0/

And of course, we have The Flash, Supergirl, and many others, both in comics, and now on TV and film.

The Worldbuilding provides the display case, the black-velvet backdrop, to show off the Strange People (the Aliens).  Some like The Flash or Supergirl are 'Good Guys" but in each case, there's some sort of "Bad Guys" for the Good Guys to fight.

What is so fascinating about these Variant Humans?

In most of the Built Worlds, "they" live secretly underneath or beside regular humans such as the reader/viewer.

In others, they have two identities, like Superman and Clark Kent.

Rarely are they publicly known and accepted, but we see that kind of Worldbuilding in novels today. I expect to see it on TV soon. We have had the TV Series Alien Nation where the aliens were known to have crash landed on Earth.

http://www.amazon.com/Pilot/dp/B005YVNGSI/

And there was the lovely TV Series Beauty and the Beast

http://www.amazon.com/An-Impossible-Silence/dp/B0126NA4V8/

So, today, the mass market audience has become accustomed to Aliens among or beneath us.

And the image of The Alien has morphed from Alien  = Bad Guy (early Hollywood, not cured by The Day The Earth Stood Still), to Aliens Are People, Too.

Thus today's Aliens (magical, Vampire, Supernatural, other dimensional, meta-human mutants by accident or genetic experiment) come in Good Guy and Bad Guy flavors.

Remember the TV Series V ?

http://www.amazon.com/V-Part-1/dp/B000U6LJ54/

What made that series interesting was the single Alien who saw how Evil was encroaching on his people and defected to the Human Resistance fighters (Good Guys).

So you see a group of 1980's TV Series here that etch the outlines of a cultural shift in the way your Romance reader audience regards and defines Good and Evil.

Perhaps the entire world culture has be 'seduced to the Dark Side of the Force?'

I doubt there is one, single, answer that a writer of any of the 4 Types can use to reach "all audiences."  But you don't need a General Relativity Theory to market a novel.

You don't need all answers or "the" answer -- you just need "an answer" that your Protagonist discovers he/she knows and believes, uses and applies to his/her problem, and WINS.

Happily Ever After is a plausible ending, a "win" if it is the optimal answer to the question posed on Page One, usually in Paragraph One.

The Good Guy/Gal is introduced on Page One at the moment in life when the general Battle of Good Vs. Evil impacts his/her life.

It is a pivotal moment that makes or breaks a life.  Some audiences lust to see a life broken, especially the life of a Good Guy/Gal.  Others yearn desperately to experience what it would be like if the "Good" quality of a human being CAUSED (because-line = plot) that person to Win.  The sure sign that winning happened is the moment when Romance turns to Love.

So what is seductive about Evil?

Find out what your audience thinks, what you think, and what your character thinks about why Evil is seducing them -- then craft the moment when Good chooses to do Good despite the apparently inevitable, and devastating cost.

Fabricate your fictional world in such a way that the Evil in it can be converted to Good, then show don't tell the process of converting.

For Romance Genre, that usually means taking your Bad Boy Hero and showing him what life is like on the Good Girl side of the tracks.

Let your Good Girl be seduced by your Bad Boy, leave him despite the cost in lost love, and by that leaving, awaken the Goodness within the Bad Boy.  The Awakening is shown not told in the moment when he 'saves the cat' at the end of the book. (Remember Darth Vader's death scene.)

That is the High Concept story we all love so much -- as in the TV Series V -- a minion of the Evil Guys has an epiphany and throws in with the Good Guys. He's a traitor to his Oath to Evil, but we see him as a Good Guy because of it. Poetic Justice.

In Romance genre, what makes Evil so sexually seductive is the potential for converting it to Good.  But what happens when Good is converted to Evil?

If you've first drafted such a novel, on rewrite, you need to write down very clearly, what is Good, what is Evil, and why they can't co-exist without conflict. You need 3 definitions to each of those three elements - your audience's, yours, and your Characters' definitions.

Conform each of the scenes in the novel to that set of definitions. The set of definitions is your Theme.  Theme is the core element in the Type D writer's rewrite process.  First Draft may be haphazzard and chaotic, dramatic power viciated by  contradicting themes. But the finished product must be pristine, single-pointed, clarity personified.

The Theme is what the book is about, what it says about Life, The Universe, and Everything. It is the Truth as the Character comes to see it at the end. The transition from delusion to truth in the Character's perceptions is the source of reader satisfaction.

In other words, the writer's job is to deliver the "Aha!" moment of illumination to the reader.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Microworlds

Imagine pores in a human skin. If you wish, imagine blackheads in pores in human skin. Now imagine each dark pore is teeming with life forms, and each one contains a slightly different and isolated ecosystem.

You'd have a one disgusting world, wouldn't you?  Or myriad disgusting microworlds.

There is a similar phenomenon in the world's glaciers, and there is a 3-page, illustrated story about it in this month's DISCOVER magazine. The authors of that article mention man-made global warming, and say that the cryoconite phenomenon is exacerbating the melting of the glaciers.

As I read about the sticky airborne bacteria flying through the air, gathering up dark dust and fragments of salts and minerals and black waterbears, then landing on glacial ice and absorbing sunlight into the dark matter and thus melting tiny holes the ice like road salt does on iced roads, I thought of all the recent volcanic activity.

I don't think the article mentioned volcanic ash, but the focus was on how the tiny dark pools form, and how ecosystems are created and fed by sunlight and photosynthesis, and how the dark dust sinks to the bottom, attracting warmth and sunlight, and increasing in size, and life thrives and evolves.

Volcanoes seemed more likely to me, especially since there was Eyjafjallojokull in 2010 (which shut down most of the European airports for several days) and then the biggest series of Icelandic volcanic eruptions in centuries through 2014, and more in 2015.  One can find a list of which volcanoes are currently erupting here: http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/erupting_volcanoes.html and more about volcanoes here: http://www.volcanodiscovery.com/news.html 

How can one talk about dark dust on glaciers and not talk about volcanoes?

So, I googled "volcanoes + cryoconite", and sure enough, someone--Patrick R Dugan PhD-- has written an excellent and highly informative book about the effect of volcanoes on "climate change" and on glaciers.

https://books.google.com/books?id=RF5HAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=PA25&dq=Volcanic+ash+%2B+cryoconite&source=bl&ots=wJ2yhXaGn0&sig=mZUKgch1Viq0UGjdrkpIJRF5U2Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvu9ew3dnMAhWMWSwKHb5WBNUQ6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=Volcanic%20ash%20%2B%20cryoconite&f=false

With my copyright activist hat on for a moment, I have to express my astonishment that Google displays over 40 consecutive pages of a 64 page book that is in copyright and for sale on Amazon. How that is an insignificant snippet of the work that cannot affect sales... is beyond my comprehension.

As one might expect, volcanoes throw up an uncommon mixture of minerals, salts, fragments of rock,  ash, dust, and no doubt bits of whatever happened to be living on the top or side of the mountain before it erupted. That explains the waterbears in the air!

As a writer of alien romances, I imagine alien worlds from time to time, and --forgive me if I've mentioned it previously-- I like the idea of multiple ecosystems developing in parallel, and in otherwise hostile surroundings.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry

The Prehistory of Artificial Intelligence

A brief historical survey of automata:

Frolicsome Engines

Machines that imitate voluntary movements, operated by hydraulics, go back at least to the first century. Later, similar mechanisms were also operated by clockwork and by cylinders with pinholes. Pinned cylinders, of course, led in a direct line to punch cards used in automatic looms and eventually to computer punch cards. Charles Babbage, in the 1830s, modeled the operations of his Analytical and Difference Engines on automatic looms.

As the article describes, many of those early automata performed frivolous activities such as soaking unwary visitors with water, not to mention the famous artificial defecating duck mentioned in the title. On a more serious level, medieval automata enacted religious motifs such as mechanized tableaux of Paradise and Hell. In the eighteenth century, pinned cylinders allowed mechanical figures to play musical instruments and produce speech.

Contemporary observers were intrigued by automata on the grounds that perhaps they "genuinely modeled the workings of nature." Automata foregrounded the philosophical theories of the time about "animate versus inanimate matter, willful versus constrained motion, mindless versus intelligent labor." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, living processes were interpreted in terms of clockwork. Nowadays, we often think of the brain as an organic computer. Our concepts of how life and thought work are heavily influenced by our technology.

Of course, the animated machines of past centuries don't display "intelligence" in any sense we recognize. Yet at the time they inspired speculation about the nature of voluntary versus involuntary action. How much independent action does an artificial device have to be capable of before it transcends the status of a toy to become a robot or an AI? When our older granddaughter was a preschooler, we gave her a talking doll that probably had more brain power than our first computer.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt