I've recently been introduced to "The Rake's Song" by the Decembrists, a ballad narrated in the first person by a very unpleasant character. Here's a link to a transcription of the lyrics (with “Isaiah” misspelled and one or two other minor errors):
http://www.lyrics-celebrities.anekatips.com/song-lyrics/the-rakes-song-lyrics-decemberists
The protagonist, an amoral young man, marries at or near the age of 21, fathers four children, and happily watches his wife die in childbirth with the stillborn fourth. Unwilling to be “saddled with three little pests,” he murders the other three, each in a different way. Rejoicing in his freedom, he denies being in any way “haunted.” Thanks to the catchy tune and clever versification, this song is stuck in my head. I keep worrying over the backstory: It’s impossible to pin down a time for the setting. The children’s names have various ethnic origins, not to mention “Dawn,” probably rare before the twentieth century. The marriage apparently occurred in a culture without reliable birth control. In a premodern society, though, it would have been acceptable for a young widower to leave small children at a foundling home or send them to a “baby farm” in the country, where they might easily die with no direct action from him. So why didn’t he do that instead of risking a murder charge? We have to assume his late wife didn’t have any relatives close enough (or at least interested enough) to question the deaths of the children; therefore they wouldn’t have censured him for abandoning them to the care of strangers.
Setting aside the obvious fact that the character is a sociopath, probably the song disturbs me so much because of his blatant loathing for babies in general, whom most people, especially parents, are programmed to regard as cute. I’m also troubled because male animals in the wild, such as lions and our primate relatives, seldom kill young they could have sired; they slaughter the offspring of rival males, a pattern that makes evolutionary sense. Sadly, human parents, of course, do sometimes murder their children. And, historically, they have often been known to “cut their losses” by killing or abandoning infants in certain circumstances, in order to be free to reproduce with more potential success later. This topic is covered in great depth and breadth, regarding both animals and human beings, in MOTHER NATURE, by Sarah Hrdy (yes, that’s how her name is spelled). If environmental circumstances aren’t favorable for animals to raise offspring to adulthood, the young may be killed or allowed to die. When resources are scant or the mother finds herself subject to some threat or stress, a rabbit has the enviable ability to end a pregnancy by re-absorbing embryos into her body. A kangaroo burdened by a joey in her pouch while fleeing from a predator may simply allow the infant to fall out, since she usually has another embryo “in the pipeline” waiting for the cue to start developing. Many hunter-gatherer societies have taboos against keeping twins. In the unlikely chance that a tribal woman gave birth to octuplets, the event would certainly be treated as a miscarriage, not a live birth. Newborns too small or ill to have a reasonable chance of thriving may be abandoned at birth with no blame attached to the mother. Preindustrial cultures, as Hrdy points out, might chastise us for not abandoning the very same infants we praise people for lavishing care on.
Thanks to our culture’s Judeo-Christian roots, we embrace the ideal of treating every child’s life as precious. But suppose we encountered an advanced alien society that didn’t share this value (which, as Hrdy’s book demonstrates, is far from “natural”)? Ancient Rome, the most “civilized” empire of its era, allowed the abandonment of unwanted infants. Heinlein’s adopted Martian, Mike, in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND reveals that Martians expect competition for survival to occur early in life rather than in adulthood. Martians relegate their young to the wilderness to prove their fitness for being allowed to grow up. (That turns out to be the origin of the cute Martian puff-ball creature in Heinlein’s YA novel RED PLANET.) How would we feel about—and deal with—a spacefaring society that practiced such customs?
Margaret L. Carter (www.margaretlcarter.com)
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Blogging and Reading and Blogging, Oh My!
I couldn't put it down.
Linnea Sinclair's Hope's Folly that I discussed in the context of the formula novel in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html
is truly a page turner that hurtles to a satisfying conclusion of the Romance -- (a beautifully twisted HEA) leaving room for a sequel though in the SF plot. (Sequels are GOOD).
If you are puzzled or dissatisfied by the novels publishing is presenting to you these days, (or buying from you to publish), you have to read Hope's Folly and Linnea's comments on another blog, about the mixed-genre author's real estate problem - how do you treat two separate plots simultaneously in the same space usually alotted to one plot?
Good question; good discussion at
http://magicalmusings.com/?p=3502#comment-63203 (scroll up for Linnea's post).
And Linnea started a really interesting discussion on goodreads.com on how to label the kind of thing we call Alien Romance -- SFR is currently being lumped with PNR (Paranormal Romance).
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/104604.Should_SFR_be_part_of_PNR_
And Linnea just posted a comment on that topic suggesting a solution using goodreads.com
I couldn't figure out goodreads.com well enough to navigate to Linnea's seed post for that discussion that's drawn over 60 comments so far. Maybe she will give us the URL in the comments to this post.
Meanwhile, on this blog, Margaret Carter brought up the recently published research about love and brain chemistry and Rowena Cherry noted the relationship between this brain chemistry research (that has been investigating all kinds of human behavior related to brain function) and Astrology (one of my own favorite topics - see my Astrology For Writers series of posts on this blog).
They've pretty much covered those topics.
So I'd like to point out that browsing among these blogs we all frequent and following authors you find stimulating (via a feed like RSS or friendfeed.com or Atom or technorati.com -- see links at the right of this page) -- will keep your thinking from going stale, and avoid or blast through writer's block.
Writers, inside their stories, are actually discussing a topic of interest to connected communities. It's like a big cocktail party -- writers circulate from group to group (reading other writers' novels) and make a comment now and then (write a novel) to contribute to the general conversation.
Writing is a social activity done in solitude! What a contradiction. No wonder we're stressed.
But with the internet, you can circulate a little each day by using a piece of software that collects pertinent (and impertinent) commentaries from all over the internet and presents them to you in a window on your desktop.
The software is called a feed reader, and there are lots of them available free around the internet. There are also websites like google that provide you a feed reader with your free email account. (if you use gmail, look at the top line of links in your mail page for READER and click - follow the directions and experiment. I quickly out-grew the google reader.).
I don't have a problem with downloading and installing software, but I do research it first. So I asked on LinkedIn and got recommendations.
FeedDemon.com is where I found the recommended download of a very tame and obedient FeedDemon feed reader.
To add a website like http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/ to FeedDemon you just have the FeedDemon software open on your desktop, use your browser to go to the website you want, then click in FeedDemon to add the site to your feeds, and the URL appears in the add slot. Click, add it to a folder provided by feeddemon and presto, you can follow what happens on that page.
I follow several newspapers and other well capitalized websites on subjects I'm interested in, and a number of blogs -- PLUS I follow people by name. It costs something for websites to provide feed, but it's free to the user like you. Blogspot has the feed capability built in, so we who post can be followed.
A Feed Reader is a kind of search software that is of the Web 2.0 world.
It really simplifies your online life.
For example, I wanted to point you to a really nice blog called Galaxy Express which did an article linking to several of our Alien Romance posts on Dialogue.
I just opened my FeedDemon software, clicked the MY CLIPPINGS folder and right there was this URL for you:
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/02/fine-art-of-dialogue.html
It was there because I saved it there, true, but how could I not save such a really nice mention of our work here!
If you leave FeedDemon open while you're online, it will (if you want) auto-update on the latest news you're tracking.
Not every website is capable of being accessed by Feed software -- but I think that is going to change. It's a Web 2.0 invention that really works. It doesn't usually access posts on social networks which try to keep you in a private sphere.
Privacy is what the Web 2.0 philosophy is all about, privacy and user choice.
Oh, which brings me to another item that turned up this last weekend.
Opinion has it that Facebook has turned inimical to the writer's health with a recent re-wording of their terms of use which appears to be a copyright grab.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/facebook.terms.service/
They'll probably change that wording again after the furor erupted. Other services that have tried this have had to yield.
But there's another huge topic (at least as big as Astrology and Love-Brain Chemistry) in the entire legal philosophy behind "copyright" -- which is utterly obsolete in this new Web 2.0 world.
The USA has been thriving on our intellectual property law and philosophy, trademarking and copyrighting. If you invent it or make it, it is yours to profit from, and you get to keep most of what you make. (almost most) This gave the USA dominance in the 1800's and 1900's.
We try so hard to honor the property rights on Blogs. What's posted belongs to the poster -- but we also want our words read, or why post at all? So we want small pithy quotes distributed to other blogs with links to the main article -- and OUR NAMES bandied about with links to our homepages.
We want to be part of that cocktail party conversation which is the blogosphere, moving from group to group, participating in the discussion. But we don't want to be invisible. We want to stay attached to our words, no matter who repeats them.
On the third hand, we don't want to be too public.
Web 2.0 domains require that you sign up for an account with the "real" you, but they allow you to upload any photo or sketch or icon for yourself and to invent a screen nickname. People who read what you write and get irrationally furious shouldn't be able to invade and ruin your "real" life.
So we are redefining "privacy," which is an essential element in Romance and even Sex.
At some point on this blog, because we focus on Science Fiction Romance as well as Fantasy Romance and Urban Fantasy -- we really ought to discuss the Art and Science of Futurology.
Linnea Sinclair's HOPE'S FOLLY does a perfect job of reticulating the Romance plot, hits every "beat" of the story, integrates all the images artistically into the Romance. But it falls short on futurology, on where the technological possibilities of today will lead us by interstellar times, and what's coming with that new Intel chip they're now building factories to produce.
Here's another post to base futurology on that could affect how, when, why and who falls in love:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm
This item was all over the news this past week about the theoretical breakthrough indicating there could be billions of "Earth Like" planets in this galaxy. SF predicted that, but now we have solid indication that it might be so. We still have the impossibility of traveling to those planets because of the light-speed barrier, but it's only a matter of time until that's dispensed with, too. Look how many impossible things we do today without thinking about it.
Most of us don't read SFR for futurology. In fact, SF may be on the wane as an artform simply because we're already living in "the future" that SF predicted, and it missed big time with predicting the impact of the internet on people.
But SFR is the prefect venue for a new cocktail party topic on how the current and easily projected new technology developments (Medical Records digitized; Designer Cancer Treatment Cocktails unique to your own genes) will impact the way we relate to each other.
In the 1970's some people predicted the Women's Movement would break up families. Men were paid more than women doing the same work so the men could "support a wife and kids" and it was considered imperative that the wife NOT WORK OUTSIDE THE HOME because kids require at least one person's full time attention or they won't grow up to be good people.
Today the last few furbishes are being put on the equal-pay-for-equal-work issues, Hillary put a big frison in the thickest Glass Ceiling, and the VP Candidate among the Republicans has a child who got pregnant out of wedlock and nobody thought that totally disqualified her from running for VP. (OK, the teen did marry the father, but they're just kids -- I saw an interview with the teen mother on TV all played very hard-news-interview style. Today the broken family is a non-issue, even in Romance novels where wives and mothers routinely work outside the home.)
Where is the futurology on the topic of Romance -- futurology that could take into account the online dating services computer programs, Astrology being "outed" as legitimate science, and the impact of the IM, bloggosphere world on Relationships?
Yes, all those have been done in Romance, but have they been done with complete SF style futurology?
Point me at some good books where the SF hits the futurology hard, and the Relationship trope changes on impact.
That was one original (1940's) definition of SF -- "The impact of Science on People, on Society, on Culture."
I know there are thousands of novels in PNR I haven't read -- and thousands of SF novels I've never heard of -- but even Amazon can't point me at exactly what I'm looking for in SFR. That's why this blog is so precious. Look at the writers who contribute!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Linnea Sinclair's Hope's Folly that I discussed in the context of the formula novel in my post
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html
is truly a page turner that hurtles to a satisfying conclusion of the Romance -- (a beautifully twisted HEA) leaving room for a sequel though in the SF plot. (Sequels are GOOD).
If you are puzzled or dissatisfied by the novels publishing is presenting to you these days, (or buying from you to publish), you have to read Hope's Folly and Linnea's comments on another blog, about the mixed-genre author's real estate problem - how do you treat two separate plots simultaneously in the same space usually alotted to one plot?
Good question; good discussion at
http://magicalmusings.com/?p=3502#comment-63203 (scroll up for Linnea's post).
And Linnea started a really interesting discussion on goodreads.com on how to label the kind of thing we call Alien Romance -- SFR is currently being lumped with PNR (Paranormal Romance).
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/104604.Should_SFR_be_part_of_PNR_
And Linnea just posted a comment on that topic suggesting a solution using goodreads.com
I couldn't figure out goodreads.com well enough to navigate to Linnea's seed post for that discussion that's drawn over 60 comments so far. Maybe she will give us the URL in the comments to this post.
Meanwhile, on this blog, Margaret Carter brought up the recently published research about love and brain chemistry and Rowena Cherry noted the relationship between this brain chemistry research (that has been investigating all kinds of human behavior related to brain function) and Astrology (one of my own favorite topics - see my Astrology For Writers series of posts on this blog).
They've pretty much covered those topics.
So I'd like to point out that browsing among these blogs we all frequent and following authors you find stimulating (via a feed like RSS or friendfeed.com or Atom or technorati.com -- see links at the right of this page) -- will keep your thinking from going stale, and avoid or blast through writer's block.
Writers, inside their stories, are actually discussing a topic of interest to connected communities. It's like a big cocktail party -- writers circulate from group to group (reading other writers' novels) and make a comment now and then (write a novel) to contribute to the general conversation.
Writing is a social activity done in solitude! What a contradiction. No wonder we're stressed.
But with the internet, you can circulate a little each day by using a piece of software that collects pertinent (and impertinent) commentaries from all over the internet and presents them to you in a window on your desktop.
The software is called a feed reader, and there are lots of them available free around the internet. There are also websites like google that provide you a feed reader with your free email account. (if you use gmail, look at the top line of links in your mail page for READER and click - follow the directions and experiment. I quickly out-grew the google reader.).
I don't have a problem with downloading and installing software, but I do research it first. So I asked on LinkedIn and got recommendations.
FeedDemon.com is where I found the recommended download of a very tame and obedient FeedDemon feed reader.
To add a website like http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/ to FeedDemon you just have the FeedDemon software open on your desktop, use your browser to go to the website you want, then click in FeedDemon to add the site to your feeds, and the URL appears in the add slot. Click, add it to a folder provided by feeddemon and presto, you can follow what happens on that page.
I follow several newspapers and other well capitalized websites on subjects I'm interested in, and a number of blogs -- PLUS I follow people by name. It costs something for websites to provide feed, but it's free to the user like you. Blogspot has the feed capability built in, so we who post can be followed.
A Feed Reader is a kind of search software that is of the Web 2.0 world.
It really simplifies your online life.
For example, I wanted to point you to a really nice blog called Galaxy Express which did an article linking to several of our Alien Romance posts on Dialogue.
I just opened my FeedDemon software, clicked the MY CLIPPINGS folder and right there was this URL for you:
http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/2009/02/fine-art-of-dialogue.html
It was there because I saved it there, true, but how could I not save such a really nice mention of our work here!
If you leave FeedDemon open while you're online, it will (if you want) auto-update on the latest news you're tracking.
Not every website is capable of being accessed by Feed software -- but I think that is going to change. It's a Web 2.0 invention that really works. It doesn't usually access posts on social networks which try to keep you in a private sphere.
Privacy is what the Web 2.0 philosophy is all about, privacy and user choice.
Oh, which brings me to another item that turned up this last weekend.
Opinion has it that Facebook has turned inimical to the writer's health with a recent re-wording of their terms of use which appears to be a copyright grab.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/17/facebook.terms.service/
They'll probably change that wording again after the furor erupted. Other services that have tried this have had to yield.
But there's another huge topic (at least as big as Astrology and Love-Brain Chemistry) in the entire legal philosophy behind "copyright" -- which is utterly obsolete in this new Web 2.0 world.
The USA has been thriving on our intellectual property law and philosophy, trademarking and copyrighting. If you invent it or make it, it is yours to profit from, and you get to keep most of what you make. (almost most) This gave the USA dominance in the 1800's and 1900's.
We try so hard to honor the property rights on Blogs. What's posted belongs to the poster -- but we also want our words read, or why post at all? So we want small pithy quotes distributed to other blogs with links to the main article -- and OUR NAMES bandied about with links to our homepages.
We want to be part of that cocktail party conversation which is the blogosphere, moving from group to group, participating in the discussion. But we don't want to be invisible. We want to stay attached to our words, no matter who repeats them.
On the third hand, we don't want to be too public.
Web 2.0 domains require that you sign up for an account with the "real" you, but they allow you to upload any photo or sketch or icon for yourself and to invent a screen nickname. People who read what you write and get irrationally furious shouldn't be able to invade and ruin your "real" life.
So we are redefining "privacy," which is an essential element in Romance and even Sex.
At some point on this blog, because we focus on Science Fiction Romance as well as Fantasy Romance and Urban Fantasy -- we really ought to discuss the Art and Science of Futurology.
Linnea Sinclair's HOPE'S FOLLY does a perfect job of reticulating the Romance plot, hits every "beat" of the story, integrates all the images artistically into the Romance. But it falls short on futurology, on where the technological possibilities of today will lead us by interstellar times, and what's coming with that new Intel chip they're now building factories to produce.
Here's another post to base futurology on that could affect how, when, why and who falls in love:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7891132.stm
This item was all over the news this past week about the theoretical breakthrough indicating there could be billions of "Earth Like" planets in this galaxy. SF predicted that, but now we have solid indication that it might be so. We still have the impossibility of traveling to those planets because of the light-speed barrier, but it's only a matter of time until that's dispensed with, too. Look how many impossible things we do today without thinking about it.
Most of us don't read SFR for futurology. In fact, SF may be on the wane as an artform simply because we're already living in "the future" that SF predicted, and it missed big time with predicting the impact of the internet on people.
But SFR is the prefect venue for a new cocktail party topic on how the current and easily projected new technology developments (Medical Records digitized; Designer Cancer Treatment Cocktails unique to your own genes) will impact the way we relate to each other.
In the 1970's some people predicted the Women's Movement would break up families. Men were paid more than women doing the same work so the men could "support a wife and kids" and it was considered imperative that the wife NOT WORK OUTSIDE THE HOME because kids require at least one person's full time attention or they won't grow up to be good people.
Today the last few furbishes are being put on the equal-pay-for-equal-work issues, Hillary put a big frison in the thickest Glass Ceiling, and the VP Candidate among the Republicans has a child who got pregnant out of wedlock and nobody thought that totally disqualified her from running for VP. (OK, the teen did marry the father, but they're just kids -- I saw an interview with the teen mother on TV all played very hard-news-interview style. Today the broken family is a non-issue, even in Romance novels where wives and mothers routinely work outside the home.)
Where is the futurology on the topic of Romance -- futurology that could take into account the online dating services computer programs, Astrology being "outed" as legitimate science, and the impact of the IM, bloggosphere world on Relationships?
Yes, all those have been done in Romance, but have they been done with complete SF style futurology?
Point me at some good books where the SF hits the futurology hard, and the Relationship trope changes on impact.
That was one original (1940's) definition of SF -- "The impact of Science on People, on Society, on Culture."
I know there are thousands of novels in PNR I haven't read -- and thousands of SF novels I've never heard of -- but even Amazon can't point me at exactly what I'm looking for in SFR. That's why this blog is so precious. Look at the writers who contribute!
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Monday, February 16, 2009
Star Trek - the new movie's site is worth a trip
http://www.startrekmovie.com/
Go play.
The site is interactive, ingenious and too damned much fun. Full screen is a must.
Enjoy, ~Linnea
HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: www.linneasinclair.com
It's an impossible mission on a derelict ship called HOPE'S FOLLY. A man who feels he can't love. A woman who believes she's unlovable. And an enemy who will stop at nothing to crush them both.
Go play.
The site is interactive, ingenious and too damned much fun. Full screen is a must.
Enjoy, ~Linnea
HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: www.linneasinclair.com
It's an impossible mission on a derelict ship called HOPE'S FOLLY. A man who feels he can't love. A woman who believes she's unlovable. And an enemy who will stop at nothing to crush them both.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Alien Romance and Zodiacal compatibility
"Mummy, I don't need an anus, do I?"
"Everyone needs an anus," I shot back with my usual practical earthiness, my mind half on the meal I was improvising at the time.
My daughter rocked with laughter. Meanwhile, mindful of certain TV ads encouraging parents to respond appropriately to potentially embarrassing discussions with young teenagers, I glanced across the room to see what might have prompted this question.
She was studying an eight hundred page tome about star signs. Apparently, star signs rule body parts.
"Which star sign is ruled by their anus?" I inquired in my most academic voice.
At first glance, the most likely suspect seemed to be Sagittarius, who is ruled by his or her legs, hips, and also --most likely-- the buttocks.
However, after some collegial debate, we agreed that it's much more probably the hapless Virgo. As if Virgoans didn't have enough to live down! They are ruled by their intestines.
My daughter drew a diagram. As you may see.
I feel I ought to explain about Scorpio and the inner thigh region. Scorpios are allegedly ruled by their sex organs. It seemed right to my daughter to depict them as strong pink and resembling a male distribution of pubic hair. She isn't as good as Stephen Biesty at drawing cross sections of the human body. Therefore, although she managed a transparent belly and pile of guts, and a very small brain looking more like a furrowed Klingon brow, she was reluctant to draw body openings.
Geminis, for those who wish to know, are ruled by their hands and arms, and also their lungs. Aquarius only has to worry about their ankles. Pisces are slaves to their feet...
The odd thing is, I know people who prove these theories.
Margaret mentioned evolution a couple of weeks ago, and --I read Discover Magazine, too-- there is a theory that we are evolving faster than ever, and in divergent directions.
I wonder. I'm sure it has been done. What would happen if we grouped ourselves according to our star signs? The dating charts seem to suggest that Geminis get along very well with other Geminis, and so forth. It could be an evolutionary problem. Or a strength.
FWIW, in my family, generations of Geminis have always managed to get along very well with Virgoans.
PS
I'm absolutely honored that SF author Robin Wayne Bailey read Knight's Fork and gave me a fabulous quote.
" entertaining and elegantly written."
~ Robin Wayne Bailey
http://www.robinwaynebailey.net
"Everyone needs an anus," I shot back with my usual practical earthiness, my mind half on the meal I was improvising at the time.
My daughter rocked with laughter. Meanwhile, mindful of certain TV ads encouraging parents to respond appropriately to potentially embarrassing discussions with young teenagers, I glanced across the room to see what might have prompted this question.
She was studying an eight hundred page tome about star signs. Apparently, star signs rule body parts.
"Which star sign is ruled by their anus?" I inquired in my most academic voice.
At first glance, the most likely suspect seemed to be Sagittarius, who is ruled by his or her legs, hips, and also --most likely-- the buttocks.
However, after some collegial debate, we agreed that it's much more probably the hapless Virgo. As if Virgoans didn't have enough to live down! They are ruled by their intestines.
My daughter drew a diagram. As you may see.
I feel I ought to explain about Scorpio and the inner thigh region. Scorpios are allegedly ruled by their sex organs. It seemed right to my daughter to depict them as strong pink and resembling a male distribution of pubic hair. She isn't as good as Stephen Biesty at drawing cross sections of the human body. Therefore, although she managed a transparent belly and pile of guts, and a very small brain looking more like a furrowed Klingon brow, she was reluctant to draw body openings.
Geminis, for those who wish to know, are ruled by their hands and arms, and also their lungs. Aquarius only has to worry about their ankles. Pisces are slaves to their feet...
The odd thing is, I know people who prove these theories.
Margaret mentioned evolution a couple of weeks ago, and --I read Discover Magazine, too-- there is a theory that we are evolving faster than ever, and in divergent directions.
I wonder. I'm sure it has been done. What would happen if we grouped ourselves according to our star signs? The dating charts seem to suggest that Geminis get along very well with other Geminis, and so forth. It could be an evolutionary problem. Or a strength.
FWIW, in my family, generations of Geminis have always managed to get along very well with Virgoans.
PS
I'm absolutely honored that SF author Robin Wayne Bailey read Knight's Fork and gave me a fabulous quote.
" entertaining and elegantly written."
~ Robin Wayne Bailey
http://www.robinwaynebailey.net
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Love Potion?
Today is the shared 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin!
DISCOVER magazine has a special issue entirely devoted to “The Brain” on the stands now. Pick it up if you can; it’s packed with fascinating articles about autistic savants, the power of music, hypnosis, “recovered memories,” animal intelligence, etc. Since Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, this seems a good time to discuss the article titled “Addicted to Love,” about the workings of oxytocin, popularly known as the love hormone or “feel-good” hormone. Evolution comes into this story, too, so it’s appropriate for this date.
The author of the article begins with the premise, “We feel the passions of love because our brains contain specific neurochemical signals that create those feelings in us.” (Well, okay, that’s the efficient cause, but not necessarily the ultimate cause.) Oxytocin activates the reward centers of the brains, the same areas that are hijacked by habit-forming drugs, making the term “addicted” somewhat apt. This chemical plays a role in sexual activity, mother-infant attachment, and commitment between mates. It’s released during orgasm and while a baby nurses. It also rises, oddly, in the bodies of women under stress, as if stress stimulates a physiological need to seek connection with other people. When researchers blocked oxytocin receptors in the brains of prairie voles, normally pair-bonding animals, the voles became promiscuous. Conversely, injecting the chemical into a related species of voles that don’t form pair-bonds made the animals monogamous.
Does this finding mean we can create a love potion with which to dose commitment-shy men and transform them into devoted partners? Unfortunately not; human beings have a more complicated psychology.
According to this article, “love is as much a part of our evolutionary heritage as is heartbeat regulation and stereo vision”—and it arises from our mammalian patterns of caring for our offspring. “The biological capacity for love is one way the brain prepares us for offspring who are born young and helpless and need tending to have the slightest hope of survival.” Thence come the bonds between parent and child and between the adults who must care for the child. If reptiles, which mate indiscriminately and typically abandon their offspring in the egg or soon afterward, had developed intelligence, “there would be no love sonnets in the reptilian canon.”
So are our affectionate emotions “nothing but” brain chemistry and the firing of neurons, potentially able to be manipulated (once we learn enough about this complex system) the way babies are “conditioned” from conception in BRAVE NEW WORLD? I don’t believe that. Even the DISCOVER article acknowledges that “the story is far more complicated than that. There is a biologically grounded brain system that creates and maintains the feeling we call love, but its cause can’t be reduced to one biochemical reaction.”
Margaret L. Carter (www.margaretlcarter.com)
DISCOVER magazine has a special issue entirely devoted to “The Brain” on the stands now. Pick it up if you can; it’s packed with fascinating articles about autistic savants, the power of music, hypnosis, “recovered memories,” animal intelligence, etc. Since Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, this seems a good time to discuss the article titled “Addicted to Love,” about the workings of oxytocin, popularly known as the love hormone or “feel-good” hormone. Evolution comes into this story, too, so it’s appropriate for this date.
The author of the article begins with the premise, “We feel the passions of love because our brains contain specific neurochemical signals that create those feelings in us.” (Well, okay, that’s the efficient cause, but not necessarily the ultimate cause.) Oxytocin activates the reward centers of the brains, the same areas that are hijacked by habit-forming drugs, making the term “addicted” somewhat apt. This chemical plays a role in sexual activity, mother-infant attachment, and commitment between mates. It’s released during orgasm and while a baby nurses. It also rises, oddly, in the bodies of women under stress, as if stress stimulates a physiological need to seek connection with other people. When researchers blocked oxytocin receptors in the brains of prairie voles, normally pair-bonding animals, the voles became promiscuous. Conversely, injecting the chemical into a related species of voles that don’t form pair-bonds made the animals monogamous.
Does this finding mean we can create a love potion with which to dose commitment-shy men and transform them into devoted partners? Unfortunately not; human beings have a more complicated psychology.
According to this article, “love is as much a part of our evolutionary heritage as is heartbeat regulation and stereo vision”—and it arises from our mammalian patterns of caring for our offspring. “The biological capacity for love is one way the brain prepares us for offspring who are born young and helpless and need tending to have the slightest hope of survival.” Thence come the bonds between parent and child and between the adults who must care for the child. If reptiles, which mate indiscriminately and typically abandon their offspring in the egg or soon afterward, had developed intelligence, “there would be no love sonnets in the reptilian canon.”
So are our affectionate emotions “nothing but” brain chemistry and the firing of neurons, potentially able to be manipulated (once we learn enough about this complex system) the way babies are “conditioned” from conception in BRAVE NEW WORLD? I don’t believe that. Even the DISCOVER article acknowledges that “the story is far more complicated than that. There is a biologically grounded brain system that creates and maintains the feeling we call love, but its cause can’t be reduced to one biochemical reaction.”
Margaret L. Carter (www.margaretlcarter.com)
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Dissing the Formula Novel
Last night I reached the halfway mark in Linnea Sinclair's current novel, Hope's Folly.
On this blog, I have said several times that there exists an exacting structural architecture behind novels that is as precise as that revealed in SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES is for films.
I've said the same thing at many writing workshops, and always there's an aspiring writer, and sometimes even a publishing writer, who says "NO! A Thousand Times NO!!!"
That storytelling is an art and there must be no fetters or artificial restrictions on artists.
Well, storytelling is an art.
And as Marion Zimmer Bradley taught us in CATCHTRAP -- Discipline is the mark of the artiste.
But let's turn it around a bit and look at all this from the story-consumer's point of view.
If storytelling is an art -- perhaps so is story reading?
If you pay a small fortune for Superbowl tickets, would you be happy to plop down in your hard seat, hotdog in hand, only to discover the gridiron full of basketball players?
Linnea has brought up a subject related to this on Goodreads.com -- a network site for people who read. Should SFR be categorized under PNR. Is SF-Romance a type of Paranormal Romance -- or is it something else?
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/104604?utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_instant
Narrative stories in print or e-text -- stories told in words -- are a game the reader plays with the writer.
Reading a writer's stories is like playing chess or cards or any other eye-to-eye sport -- you get to know the writer.
Thus clever readers follow a byline. Some will look up the writer's pen names and follow all their work -- but usually have a favorite byline.
That's because we use pen-names to play different games.
Likewise, genre labels actually label the GAME the writer is offering to play with the reader.
Linnea is a great Dungeon Master! She'll lead you a merry chase. She follows two formulae at once and sticks to both -- a neat trick.
HOPE'S FOLLY is a case in point (by the halfway mark; I don't know about the ending yet so this isn't a review but a "heads-up").
Linnea nailed the halfway mark with the "beat" of the Romance that has to go at that exact point.
And simultaneously, as a complication to the Romance but also the instigator of the Romance, the SF half of the plot hits the exact point that an SF novel has to hit at the halfway mark.
Because this is a "happy ending" genre (or at worst, bitter-sweet or cliff-hanger ending genre) -- the half-way mark has to be DARKEST HOUR when you can taste success, see it, smell it, know it - and somehow BAM success becomes impossible.
In film, they call the halfway point "raising the stakes" -- what can be lost by failing to succeed suddenly burgeons into something far more important than it was at the beginning.
Perhaps because of the mass market industries driving these "games readers play" with writers -- readers have internalized this structure and come to expect it -- and enjoy that expectation being fulfilled.
Maybe there is an artistic artificiality behind that, but it is inherent in the nature of entertainment that the most enjoyment a reader/viewer has from the underlying structural solidity of a story comes from the strength of that structural integrity, yes, but MOSTLY FROM THE STRUCTURE BEING INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE.
Readers aren't supposed to be able to see the structure consciously. Writers must not only see that structure, but know lots of structures and be able to pour their story ideas into the structure most appropriate to the artistic material of the story.
Writers are there to be Dungeon Masters engineering a great, good, chase that allows readers a vast amount of freedom to create for themselves, but at the same time provides the latticework of structure.
Thus folks who are making the transition from Reader to Writer have to pass through a phase of "denial" (much like that phase which is part of grieving because they are grieving their personal innocence lost) in which they insist there are no structural rules they can not and should not break.
True art is formless.
The reader believes that because they have not been discerning the structure of the novels they like the most, and thus believe what they adore is structurelessness.
To gain the ability to write what they truly like to read, they must first admit that what they adore most is the structure -- and any solid flesh on that structure will satisfy.
Because readers don't perceive the underlying structure that thrills their subconscious minds, they participate in the game publishers play inventing genre labels.
Publishers try out a genre label and see if it "sells" -- if it shows promise, they put the label on more things. When they see which things sell better with that label, they begin to buy from writers only things which share that structure to publish under that label. Readers get to trust the genre label, and buy more.
With whetted appetite for a given structure, readers will scarf up more and more of anything called by that genre label.
Eventually, the market gets saturated, sales plummet, and something else skyrockets in sales. Publishers seek a label that says "just like what skyrocketed" and start trying to buy novels written with that exact same structure.
It's a cycle. I've known editors who survived the rise and fall of the bodice ripper, and other sub-genres. I know how they think. It's all about profit.
That won't change - it being all about profit.
So people who share a taste for a particular structure with lots of other people will have lots of novels to choose from. People who are looking for structures that are not popular will have to search in the byways of publishing, not the highways.
However, all that is now changing and changing very fast.
It's the recession-depression whatever we're facing. Intel has just announced they're building a new plant to make chips smaller and faster than EVER that use much less electricity (thus produce less heat).
E-books may be riding on the coat-tails of tech applications, but the coat-tails just got broader and longer with Intel's announcement. The e-book reader has always been the stumbling block in the logical extension of the data revolution to novels.
Readers have always been less than 5% of the population and currently that might be more like 3% (of people who read for fun, not instruction or work). Distribution has always been the commercial barrier.
Paper publishing is still melting down. We're losing newspapers (paperback books are printed on newsprint usually; no papers, no huge market for newsprint, and paper prices soar too high to make books affordable). Gas prices will soar again in a few months (April 2010 crude is over $50/barrel; today it's $39/barrel). Distribution of tons of printed books only to have them discarded is just not economical with a shrinking reading population.
Amazon CEO was interviewed on TV last night bragging they want to have all the books in the world ever printed available on Kindle. Google has similar ambitions.
The origin of "genre" lies in the secret publishers keep from readers -- that what readers get addicted to is STRUCTURE. Each genre has a set structure. It's not content or background, as seems intuitively obvious, it's structure.
"Space Opera" is the Western set in space. The "Western" is no longer saleable as book or TV show. But it lives on in Star Trek, Stargate, and there will be new icons of adventure into The Unknown.
The electronic tech revolution is eliminating the mechanism that makes keeping that secret profitable.
The structure of the fiction delivery system is in total disarray at the moment and will continue to foment. In fact, this next 18 months or so may be crucial to the novel as we know it.
Note this article -- it's not very new and doesn't say much new stuff, but it compiles a lot of facts into a picture that may show you what I'm talking about.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Mobile+and+Wireless&articleId=9127538&taxonomyId=15&pageNumber=1
It's in a tech 'zine online, true, so there's bias.
I have to point out that I think "structure" will prevail. That there are reasons why the most people prefer this or that structure at any given time. That getting the most readers or viewers for your story will always be a writer's goal.
Also there are sound spiritual and esoteric reasons why this or that structure appeals to this or that audience.
Although we may see the e-market swamped with stories that have that so-yearned-for undisciplined formlessness that new writers and even some readers yearn for, I think the structural formula will prevail.
These formulae are not something writers made up, and not something publishers just invented and forced on us. They are formulae developed over millennia of storytelling from cave camp fire to e-book. They are formulae developed because storytellers wanted to hold their audience's attention.
They are formulae rooted deep in human psychology and spirituality. That's why readers become addicted to them. These formulae speak to the essence of what makes us human.
That's why I admire Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series so much. He, personally, as an individual knows how primal this formula is. STC! GOES TO THE MOVIES delineates the exact rules for each of 10 genres Blake has identified empirically. He didn't invent them. Hollywood didn't invent them. MOVIE-GOERS INVENTED THEM by spending money to see movies with those formulae and shunning movies that didn't have those structures.
The formula is the genre.
Which brings us back to Linnea Sinclair.
I'm sure some readers will fault her execution of whichever Romance formula she is using for any given book. And I know I find missing elements in her SF formula. But she's put the two together into a very satisfying mix.
I, for one, am impressed with how she nailed that halfway-point in both formulae at once.
Those who were reading and studying what she and I have written on this blog about the Expository Lump, notably this post on verisimilitude vs reality and the blog posts linked within it -
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
should read and study the first 2 chapters of HOPE'S FOLLY, and the effect they have on you as a reader -- then the way the pacing changes in Chapter 3 and onwards.
Linnea explained the technique she used in the first 2 chapters, and I think there's a link to her explanation in this post.
Creating these effects on readers is an artform. When you want to create the effect Linnea created for you, use the technique she adopted here.
Just note that without those first 2 chapters, the mid-point of both the SF plot and the Romance plot of the story would not fall at the mid-point of the page count.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
On this blog, I have said several times that there exists an exacting structural architecture behind novels that is as precise as that revealed in SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES is for films.
I've said the same thing at many writing workshops, and always there's an aspiring writer, and sometimes even a publishing writer, who says "NO! A Thousand Times NO!!!"
That storytelling is an art and there must be no fetters or artificial restrictions on artists.
Well, storytelling is an art.
And as Marion Zimmer Bradley taught us in CATCHTRAP -- Discipline is the mark of the artiste.
But let's turn it around a bit and look at all this from the story-consumer's point of view.
If storytelling is an art -- perhaps so is story reading?
If you pay a small fortune for Superbowl tickets, would you be happy to plop down in your hard seat, hotdog in hand, only to discover the gridiron full of basketball players?
Linnea has brought up a subject related to this on Goodreads.com -- a network site for people who read. Should SFR be categorized under PNR. Is SF-Romance a type of Paranormal Romance -- or is it something else?
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/104604?utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_instant
Narrative stories in print or e-text -- stories told in words -- are a game the reader plays with the writer.
Reading a writer's stories is like playing chess or cards or any other eye-to-eye sport -- you get to know the writer.
Thus clever readers follow a byline. Some will look up the writer's pen names and follow all their work -- but usually have a favorite byline.
That's because we use pen-names to play different games.
Likewise, genre labels actually label the GAME the writer is offering to play with the reader.
Linnea is a great Dungeon Master! She'll lead you a merry chase. She follows two formulae at once and sticks to both -- a neat trick.
HOPE'S FOLLY is a case in point (by the halfway mark; I don't know about the ending yet so this isn't a review but a "heads-up").
Linnea nailed the halfway mark with the "beat" of the Romance that has to go at that exact point.
And simultaneously, as a complication to the Romance but also the instigator of the Romance, the SF half of the plot hits the exact point that an SF novel has to hit at the halfway mark.
Because this is a "happy ending" genre (or at worst, bitter-sweet or cliff-hanger ending genre) -- the half-way mark has to be DARKEST HOUR when you can taste success, see it, smell it, know it - and somehow BAM success becomes impossible.
In film, they call the halfway point "raising the stakes" -- what can be lost by failing to succeed suddenly burgeons into something far more important than it was at the beginning.
Perhaps because of the mass market industries driving these "games readers play" with writers -- readers have internalized this structure and come to expect it -- and enjoy that expectation being fulfilled.
Maybe there is an artistic artificiality behind that, but it is inherent in the nature of entertainment that the most enjoyment a reader/viewer has from the underlying structural solidity of a story comes from the strength of that structural integrity, yes, but MOSTLY FROM THE STRUCTURE BEING INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE.
Readers aren't supposed to be able to see the structure consciously. Writers must not only see that structure, but know lots of structures and be able to pour their story ideas into the structure most appropriate to the artistic material of the story.
Writers are there to be Dungeon Masters engineering a great, good, chase that allows readers a vast amount of freedom to create for themselves, but at the same time provides the latticework of structure.
Thus folks who are making the transition from Reader to Writer have to pass through a phase of "denial" (much like that phase which is part of grieving because they are grieving their personal innocence lost) in which they insist there are no structural rules they can not and should not break.
True art is formless.
The reader believes that because they have not been discerning the structure of the novels they like the most, and thus believe what they adore is structurelessness.
To gain the ability to write what they truly like to read, they must first admit that what they adore most is the structure -- and any solid flesh on that structure will satisfy.
Because readers don't perceive the underlying structure that thrills their subconscious minds, they participate in the game publishers play inventing genre labels.
Publishers try out a genre label and see if it "sells" -- if it shows promise, they put the label on more things. When they see which things sell better with that label, they begin to buy from writers only things which share that structure to publish under that label. Readers get to trust the genre label, and buy more.
With whetted appetite for a given structure, readers will scarf up more and more of anything called by that genre label.
Eventually, the market gets saturated, sales plummet, and something else skyrockets in sales. Publishers seek a label that says "just like what skyrocketed" and start trying to buy novels written with that exact same structure.
It's a cycle. I've known editors who survived the rise and fall of the bodice ripper, and other sub-genres. I know how they think. It's all about profit.
That won't change - it being all about profit.
So people who share a taste for a particular structure with lots of other people will have lots of novels to choose from. People who are looking for structures that are not popular will have to search in the byways of publishing, not the highways.
However, all that is now changing and changing very fast.
It's the recession-depression whatever we're facing. Intel has just announced they're building a new plant to make chips smaller and faster than EVER that use much less electricity (thus produce less heat).
E-books may be riding on the coat-tails of tech applications, but the coat-tails just got broader and longer with Intel's announcement. The e-book reader has always been the stumbling block in the logical extension of the data revolution to novels.
Readers have always been less than 5% of the population and currently that might be more like 3% (of people who read for fun, not instruction or work). Distribution has always been the commercial barrier.
Paper publishing is still melting down. We're losing newspapers (paperback books are printed on newsprint usually; no papers, no huge market for newsprint, and paper prices soar too high to make books affordable). Gas prices will soar again in a few months (April 2010 crude is over $50/barrel; today it's $39/barrel). Distribution of tons of printed books only to have them discarded is just not economical with a shrinking reading population.
Amazon CEO was interviewed on TV last night bragging they want to have all the books in the world ever printed available on Kindle. Google has similar ambitions.
The origin of "genre" lies in the secret publishers keep from readers -- that what readers get addicted to is STRUCTURE. Each genre has a set structure. It's not content or background, as seems intuitively obvious, it's structure.
"Space Opera" is the Western set in space. The "Western" is no longer saleable as book or TV show. But it lives on in Star Trek, Stargate, and there will be new icons of adventure into The Unknown.
The electronic tech revolution is eliminating the mechanism that makes keeping that secret profitable.
The structure of the fiction delivery system is in total disarray at the moment and will continue to foment. In fact, this next 18 months or so may be crucial to the novel as we know it.
Note this article -- it's not very new and doesn't say much new stuff, but it compiles a lot of facts into a picture that may show you what I'm talking about.
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Mobile+and+Wireless&articleId=9127538&taxonomyId=15&pageNumber=1
It's in a tech 'zine online, true, so there's bias.
I have to point out that I think "structure" will prevail. That there are reasons why the most people prefer this or that structure at any given time. That getting the most readers or viewers for your story will always be a writer's goal.
Also there are sound spiritual and esoteric reasons why this or that structure appeals to this or that audience.
Although we may see the e-market swamped with stories that have that so-yearned-for undisciplined formlessness that new writers and even some readers yearn for, I think the structural formula will prevail.
These formulae are not something writers made up, and not something publishers just invented and forced on us. They are formulae developed over millennia of storytelling from cave camp fire to e-book. They are formulae developed because storytellers wanted to hold their audience's attention.
They are formulae rooted deep in human psychology and spirituality. That's why readers become addicted to them. These formulae speak to the essence of what makes us human.
That's why I admire Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series so much. He, personally, as an individual knows how primal this formula is. STC! GOES TO THE MOVIES delineates the exact rules for each of 10 genres Blake has identified empirically. He didn't invent them. Hollywood didn't invent them. MOVIE-GOERS INVENTED THEM by spending money to see movies with those formulae and shunning movies that didn't have those structures.
The formula is the genre.
Which brings us back to Linnea Sinclair.
I'm sure some readers will fault her execution of whichever Romance formula she is using for any given book. And I know I find missing elements in her SF formula. But she's put the two together into a very satisfying mix.
I, for one, am impressed with how she nailed that halfway-point in both formulae at once.
Those who were reading and studying what she and I have written on this blog about the Expository Lump, notably this post on verisimilitude vs reality and the blog posts linked within it -
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
should read and study the first 2 chapters of HOPE'S FOLLY, and the effect they have on you as a reader -- then the way the pacing changes in Chapter 3 and onwards.
Linnea explained the technique she used in the first 2 chapters, and I think there's a link to her explanation in this post.
Creating these effects on readers is an artform. When you want to create the effect Linnea created for you, use the technique she adopted here.
Just note that without those first 2 chapters, the mid-point of both the SF plot and the Romance plot of the story would not fall at the mid-point of the page count.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Monday, February 09, 2009
Speaking and Swearing in Alien Tongues: Reprise
For those of you with little time to go poking through the archives here, and in keeping with Jacqueline's posts on dialogue, here are the two posts I did eons ago on speaking and swearing in (intergalactic) alien tongues:
PART UNO: SPEAKING IN [ALIEN] TONGUES
There's an old-- and somewhat disparaging-- anecdote in which Mr. Average American travels to Paris, France and complains to his wife, "Know what's wrong with this place? Too many durned furrinners who can't speak English!"
The problem with some of speculative fiction and science fiction/fantasy romance is the opposite one. For some unknown reason, everyone in the universe speaks English. American, Canadian or British version, but they all speak English.
Maybe this is a reaction to too many visits to Paris (can there be too many visits to Paris?). More likely, it reflects an author's fear of not understanding how to build a realistic language or of confusing the reader with alien phrases or terms.
Fears well founded. On the other side of the intergalactic literary coin, there are those spec fic and SFR novels in which the use of an alien language is a jarring distraction. It's overdone, comically done (and the intention is not to be comical) or snobbishly done (what, you mean you haven't memorized the Klingon dictionary?).
One of the necessary parts of world building, one of the necessary parts of crafting a believable spec fic novel, is the inclusion of alien concepts, religions, cultures and terms. Words.
“I want you. Yav chera.” His hoarse whisper filled her ear. “Yav chera, Trilby-chenka. Tell me you want me.”
She turned her face slightly to look at him. There was a softness in the lines of his face she’d never seen before. An openness. A vulnerability. It tugged at her heart.
“Yav chera,” she replied softly.
His thumb covered her lips. “Yav cheron. If you want me, it is yav cheron. When I want you, which is all the time, it is yav chera.”
He moved his thumb and brushed his lips against hers.
“Yav cheron,” she told him. She laced her fingers through his hair and pulled his face back to hers. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair)
The trick is to make the inclusion of the words, the phrases, the names, the terms as natural and effortless as possible for the reader. The reader will be reading/hearing this language for the first time. But that's not a unique situation in spec fic. The reader is also encountering sickbays and starship bridges for the first time, or alien city streets, or space station corridors. Or forests thick with flora and fauna heretofore unknown and unimagined.
If you can make a reader see those things-- those station corridors, those lofty forests-- you can make them hear and understand your alien language.
One of the easiest ways I used above: make one person explain the language to the other. “I want you. Yav chera,” Rhis says to Trilby, thereby informing the reader of the meaning of the words 'yav chera'. He goes further by correcting her: Yav cheron is what she should say to him. So the reader begins-- consciously or unconsciously-- to see a pattern: chera/cheron. Female/male.
I use this same template for Rhis's language Z'fharish, through the rest of Finders Keepers. But it's not a template I invented. I gleefully filched it from two workbooks I have on my bookshelf: Italian Made Simple and Vamos Apprender Portuguese.
And I've just taught you something else: you may not speak a word of Portuguese, but by comparison, by equivalency, you're going to at least figure that Vamos Apprender Portuguese is a book with the same function as Italian Made Simple.
“Ground forces. Like your marines,” he said, plucking at the insignia of crossed swords on his chest, “but we call ourselves Stegzarda. ‘Stegzarda’ means perhaps ‘strength command’ in your language. We assist the Imperial Fleet when it comes to border outposts.”
Farra nodded. “Especially with recent jhavedzga—”
“Aggression.” Mitkanos corrected her. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair.)
Farra says the word in Z'fharish (Trilby's at the table listening to all this). Mitkanos, her uncle, corrects her. He also, conversationally, defines another term for Trilby.
Just as a good writer weaves in essentials elements and clues through dialogue (never, never using an info dump!), so a good spec fic writer can weave bits and pieces of a language into conversation.
But let's get back to using Vamos Apprender Portuguese as a template. You don't have to use 'We're Going to Learn Portuguese' (which is what that title says). You can use Russian or Japanese or Swahili as a template. Or you can combine templates of several languages. The point is, start with a basic linguistic template and it'll make your language-world building go so much smoother.
In Vamos, we learn o amigo and a amiga both mean 'friend'. We also see that our amigos are male and our amigas are female. (And yes, this is the same as Spanish and Italian - which is another point to keep in mind). We also see that the subject pronoun is often dropped (I, she, we) and the ending of the verb denotes the subject pronoun: Eu falo (I speak) is the same as Falo (I speak). Falamos is We speak. Same as Nos falamos.
Bear with me. I'm not trying to prep you for a trip to Rio de Janeiro, nice as that would be. I'm trying to show you that if it's done on this planet, you can do it on your planet.
Find a language template and use it. In Finders Keepers, I used Portuguese, Polish/Russian and un petite peu of French. Not the words - but the structure and conjugations. The sequence of words. And obviously, the sound of words.
Which brings me to another point about language-world building: not everyone sounds the same, even if they speak the same language.
Drogue’s bright-eyed gaze ran up and down my length, or lack of. “Captain Chasidah Bergren. Yes.” He stuck out his hand.
I accepted it.
“You are well?” he asked.
I tried to place his accent. South system, Dafir? Possibly. “All things considered, yes.” Some of my wariness returned. The Englarians were invariably cooperative with the government. I still had visions of a firing squad as a reception committee, Sully’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. (from Gabriel's Ghost by Linnea Sinclair.)
When I was a wee kidling, my parents gave me this enormous dictionary that contained a number of appendices, including 'Regional Variations In American Pronunciation' by Charles K. Thomas, PhD. Of course, even at 11 years old, I knew not everyone sounded alike. My grandmother, from Poland, spoke nothing like my teachers at school. And my neighbor Patty's parents, who were from Tennessee, sounded very different from anyone in my small town in New Jersey. But I'd never before seen those differences in writing. Dr. Thomas delineated ten different speech regions in the US of A. Ten! Eastern New England, North Central, New York City, Middle Atlantic, Western Pennsylvania, Southern Mountain, Southern, Central Midland, Northwest and Southwest.
And yet we have spec fic novels that while, yes, they include an alien language, all the aliens in the entire galaxy sound the same. No, they won't. They may read the same to the reader but they won't sound the same to your characters. Someone-- like Chasidah, above-- will notice the difference. You want your character to notice the difference. Different languages are as essential to world building as different religions, customs and even climate.
And just as with the weaving in of your alien culture or climate, use of an alien language must be done with a delicate touch. You're still writing for an English-speaking audience (or whatever other language your novel is written in). You must provide your reader with enough of a story they can understand or they won't slip into your fictional world.
Pick five or six key phrases; eight or ten key words, sprinkle your dialogue with them just enough times for the words to feel familiar. You don't jump when you walk into a French restaurant and are greeted with "Bon soir". The words, the sound, the accent belong in the setting. Your alien language should work the same way. Make the language flow easily with the scene any time you use it. Don't force your reader to stop and puzzle over it, or it might draw him out of the story. And then he'll put your novel down, grumbling… "Too many durned aliens in that book!"
REFERENCE:
Conceiving The Heavens by Melissa Scott
How to Writer Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
ONLINE:
The Language Construction Kit - http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
Pegasus Nest // games // languages in role-playing games - http://pegasus.cityofveils.com/rpglang.phtml
Patricia C. Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions - http://www.sfwa.org/writing/worldbuilding5.htm#Lang
PART DEUX: SWEARING IN ALIEN TONGUES
Is everything okay?
An innocuous question; one posed daily, if not hourly in our society. Yet several years ago, answering that question almost put a friend of mine in the midst of a full-blown melee.
You see, he was in a restaurant in a foreign country and was asked by the restaurant owner (via an interpreter) if “…everything (meal, wine, service) was okay.”
PART UNO: SPEAKING IN [ALIEN] TONGUES
There's an old-- and somewhat disparaging-- anecdote in which Mr. Average American travels to Paris, France and complains to his wife, "Know what's wrong with this place? Too many durned furrinners who can't speak English!"The problem with some of speculative fiction and science fiction/fantasy romance is the opposite one. For some unknown reason, everyone in the universe speaks English. American, Canadian or British version, but they all speak English.
Maybe this is a reaction to too many visits to Paris (can there be too many visits to Paris?). More likely, it reflects an author's fear of not understanding how to build a realistic language or of confusing the reader with alien phrases or terms.
Fears well founded. On the other side of the intergalactic literary coin, there are those spec fic and SFR novels in which the use of an alien language is a jarring distraction. It's overdone, comically done (and the intention is not to be comical) or snobbishly done (what, you mean you haven't memorized the Klingon dictionary?).
One of the necessary parts of world building, one of the necessary parts of crafting a believable spec fic novel, is the inclusion of alien concepts, religions, cultures and terms. Words.
“I want you. Yav chera.” His hoarse whisper filled her ear. “Yav chera, Trilby-chenka. Tell me you want me.”
She turned her face slightly to look at him. There was a softness in the lines of his face she’d never seen before. An openness. A vulnerability. It tugged at her heart.
“Yav chera,” she replied softly.
His thumb covered her lips. “Yav cheron. If you want me, it is yav cheron. When I want you, which is all the time, it is yav chera.”
He moved his thumb and brushed his lips against hers.
“Yav cheron,” she told him. She laced her fingers through his hair and pulled his face back to hers. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair)
The trick is to make the inclusion of the words, the phrases, the names, the terms as natural and effortless as possible for the reader. The reader will be reading/hearing this language for the first time. But that's not a unique situation in spec fic. The reader is also encountering sickbays and starship bridges for the first time, or alien city streets, or space station corridors. Or forests thick with flora and fauna heretofore unknown and unimagined.
If you can make a reader see those things-- those station corridors, those lofty forests-- you can make them hear and understand your alien language.
One of the easiest ways I used above: make one person explain the language to the other. “I want you. Yav chera,” Rhis says to Trilby, thereby informing the reader of the meaning of the words 'yav chera'. He goes further by correcting her: Yav cheron is what she should say to him. So the reader begins-- consciously or unconsciously-- to see a pattern: chera/cheron. Female/male.
I use this same template for Rhis's language Z'fharish, through the rest of Finders Keepers. But it's not a template I invented. I gleefully filched it from two workbooks I have on my bookshelf: Italian Made Simple and Vamos Apprender Portuguese.
And I've just taught you something else: you may not speak a word of Portuguese, but by comparison, by equivalency, you're going to at least figure that Vamos Apprender Portuguese is a book with the same function as Italian Made Simple.
“Ground forces. Like your marines,” he said, plucking at the insignia of crossed swords on his chest, “but we call ourselves Stegzarda. ‘Stegzarda’ means perhaps ‘strength command’ in your language. We assist the Imperial Fleet when it comes to border outposts.”
Farra nodded. “Especially with recent jhavedzga—”
“Aggression.” Mitkanos corrected her. (from Finders Keepers by Linnea Sinclair.)
Farra says the word in Z'fharish (Trilby's at the table listening to all this). Mitkanos, her uncle, corrects her. He also, conversationally, defines another term for Trilby.
Just as a good writer weaves in essentials elements and clues through dialogue (never, never using an info dump!), so a good spec fic writer can weave bits and pieces of a language into conversation.
But let's get back to using Vamos Apprender Portuguese as a template. You don't have to use 'We're Going to Learn Portuguese' (which is what that title says). You can use Russian or Japanese or Swahili as a template. Or you can combine templates of several languages. The point is, start with a basic linguistic template and it'll make your language-world building go so much smoother.
In Vamos, we learn o amigo and a amiga both mean 'friend'. We also see that our amigos are male and our amigas are female. (And yes, this is the same as Spanish and Italian - which is another point to keep in mind). We also see that the subject pronoun is often dropped (I, she, we) and the ending of the verb denotes the subject pronoun: Eu falo (I speak) is the same as Falo (I speak). Falamos is We speak. Same as Nos falamos.
Bear with me. I'm not trying to prep you for a trip to Rio de Janeiro, nice as that would be. I'm trying to show you that if it's done on this planet, you can do it on your planet.
Find a language template and use it. In Finders Keepers, I used Portuguese, Polish/Russian and un petite peu of French. Not the words - but the structure and conjugations. The sequence of words. And obviously, the sound of words.
Which brings me to another point about language-world building: not everyone sounds the same, even if they speak the same language.
Drogue’s bright-eyed gaze ran up and down my length, or lack of. “Captain Chasidah Bergren. Yes.” He stuck out his hand.
I accepted it.
“You are well?” he asked.
I tried to place his accent. South system, Dafir? Possibly. “All things considered, yes.” Some of my wariness returned. The Englarians were invariably cooperative with the government. I still had visions of a firing squad as a reception committee, Sully’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. (from Gabriel's Ghost by Linnea Sinclair.)
When I was a wee kidling, my parents gave me this enormous dictionary that contained a number of appendices, including 'Regional Variations In American Pronunciation' by Charles K. Thomas, PhD. Of course, even at 11 years old, I knew not everyone sounded alike. My grandmother, from Poland, spoke nothing like my teachers at school. And my neighbor Patty's parents, who were from Tennessee, sounded very different from anyone in my small town in New Jersey. But I'd never before seen those differences in writing. Dr. Thomas delineated ten different speech regions in the US of A. Ten! Eastern New England, North Central, New York City, Middle Atlantic, Western Pennsylvania, Southern Mountain, Southern, Central Midland, Northwest and Southwest.
And yet we have spec fic novels that while, yes, they include an alien language, all the aliens in the entire galaxy sound the same. No, they won't. They may read the same to the reader but they won't sound the same to your characters. Someone-- like Chasidah, above-- will notice the difference. You want your character to notice the difference. Different languages are as essential to world building as different religions, customs and even climate.
And just as with the weaving in of your alien culture or climate, use of an alien language must be done with a delicate touch. You're still writing for an English-speaking audience (or whatever other language your novel is written in). You must provide your reader with enough of a story they can understand or they won't slip into your fictional world.
Pick five or six key phrases; eight or ten key words, sprinkle your dialogue with them just enough times for the words to feel familiar. You don't jump when you walk into a French restaurant and are greeted with "Bon soir". The words, the sound, the accent belong in the setting. Your alien language should work the same way. Make the language flow easily with the scene any time you use it. Don't force your reader to stop and puzzle over it, or it might draw him out of the story. And then he'll put your novel down, grumbling… "Too many durned aliens in that book!"
REFERENCE:
Conceiving The Heavens by Melissa Scott
How to Writer Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
ONLINE:
The Language Construction Kit - http://www.zompist.com/kit.html
Pegasus Nest // games // languages in role-playing games - http://pegasus.cityofveils.com/rpglang.phtml
Patricia C. Wrede's Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions - http://www.sfwa.org/writing/worldbuilding5.htm#Lang
PART DEUX: SWEARING IN ALIEN TONGUES
Is everything okay?
An innocuous question; one posed daily, if not hourly in our society. Yet several years ago, answering that question almost put a friend of mine in the midst of a full-blown melee.
You see, he was in a restaurant in a foreign country and was asked by the restaurant owner (via an interpreter) if “…everything (meal, wine, service) was okay.”
Not being fluent in the local language, my friend responded by making the good ol' American 'okay' sign: his thumb and index finger forming a circle, the other three fingers extended.
As the proprietor bellowed and tables almost overturned, my friend realized he'd evidently made a big mistake. He had. In his present locale, that hand gesture was synonymous for a lower body orifice, and not a pleasant orifice at that.
For all intents and purposes, he'd just called his host an… well, you know what he'd called him.
When I write my science fiction romance novels, I think about things like that. Not lower body orifices, mind you. I think about what we in this country, on the planet, deem as insulting. And how that might translate to the culture I've built for my novels.
The first lesson I've learned from the above example is that profanity is not planet-wide. What's okay in America may well be a reason to riot in Rio. Though admittedly, it was what the gesture stood for, and not the gesture itself, that was found so offensive.
Which brings me to the question I always ask myself when I'm world building: Self, what would this alien culture find offensive, and why?
It's rather a nice question to ask yourself as well, as you embark on your SF&F world building. Because answering it will make your worlds and your characters that much more complete, that much more alive to your readers.
In general, those that reside on this planet we call Earth find the following categories offensive and fertile fodder for foul language: blaspheming a revered deity, excrement, sexual acts, illegitimacy, body parts relating to excrement and sexual activity, and sexual activity with culturally unacceptable participants, including oneself.
All fairly obvious and self-explanatory to us here on Earth (and if you want to explore the matter further, the tome most oft cited is Geoffrey Hughes' Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, (Penguin USA). But we're not writing about here on Earth. We're writing about Rigel-V and Tatooine and the Skolian Empire and Moabar. Or maybe the Vash Nadah or the Khalar.
So we need to understand what those people in those places value, or don't, in order to understand how they swear.
Couldn't they value the same things we do? Sure. But why stop there? Moreover, why would they value exactly the same things we do? If the fictional culture you're creating is a carbon copy of Freehold, New Jersey set but set on the planet Gryck-2, then, in my humble opinion, you're cheating your readers. People don't read SF because they want to be immersed in the common. They read it to explore the uncommon.
If you read C.J. Cherryh's Chanur series, you'll see that one of the most common insults the feline race known as the Hani has is to call another Hani “an earless bastard.” And it isn't the
bastardy that's the serious part of the insult—it’s the earless-ness. Ears, and the adornment of ears, are symbolic of success. (Being owned by cats myself, I can confirm that ears and tails are sources of great pride.) So what does your fantasy or sci fi culture hold dear, and what do they disdain?
If parentage is taken lightly, then calling someone a bastard will most likely not be effective (this is true of some aboriginal cultures here on this planet). If there are no restrictions on sexual practices or partners, then perhaps your character could start a fistfight by calling the bad guy a monogamist.
How would those who spend their lives in the space lanes—perhaps are even born in space—view those who've never left the planet? “Dirtsuckers” is a term I've used derisively in my books, showing a prejudice by the space-born against the planet-born.
The entire issue of prejudice fueled the culture, and many of the insults, in my Gabriel's Ghost. The Taka are a furred race that, for the most part, work only in the lowest-paying and demeaning jobs. Prejudice against them, by humanoids, is common in the world of Captain Chasidah Bergren and Gabriel Ross Sullivan:
Sully stepped up to the worker. “Pardon, brother. We seek a Takan brother with urgent family news.”
The man barely glanced at Sully as he ran his hand through his thinning hair in an exasperated motion. Chatter still came from the podium speaker.
“What’s that? Hang on, I got some religious guy here needs to find a furry.”
The term 'furry', inoffensive to us, is a slur here.
But the Takas aren't the only species looked down upon in Gabriel's Ghost, as Chaz knows when she's speaking to Captain Philip Guthrie:
[Guthrie]: “No. The Farosians. With a Stolorth Ragkiril. We know that. How you would get involved with them, how you would get involved with that I cannot understand.”
‘That’ meant a Stolorth. A Fleet-issue sentiment of disgust.
As readers of Gabriel's Ghost learn, Stolorths are feared. Takas are simply dismissed as lesser beings. But both are recipients of prejudice, and often out of prejudice are insults born.
Blasphemy is born out of devotion. What gods or goddesses do your characters revere? What
edicts has their religion placed on them? Is there a place, like hell, that your characters long to send their enemies? Or, if your characters are star-travelers, is it sufficient simply to sneer, "Oh, go suck dirt!" in order to be insulting?A caution on using invented words: Oh, grzzbft! tends to sound more comical than threatening to English-acclimated ears. That doesn't mean you can't utilize your alien language in order to create alien profanity. Just try to anchor it to something the reader can identify with—an alien word or concept already used in the story, for example. Or use the 'comparative' method I noted in my previous article on constructing alien languages.
I used both methods in my Games of Command— which is, by the way, considerably lighter in tone than Gabriel's Ghost—so I wasn't quite as worried about the giggle factor:
She heard the smart click of the cabin door lock recycling. She dove under the desk, fitting her small form into the kneehole, and shoved her com badge down the front of her shirt. If it beeped now, she was toast.
Cabin lights flicked on. Heavy footsteps moved across the carpeted floor as the door swooshed closed.
Damn! Shit! Sonofabitch! Sass ran through every swearword she knew in five languages. Frack! Grenzar! Antz-k’ran! Trock!
And
“I’d love to launch a raftwide mullytrock, but then we’d have every other damned jockey in straps burning bulkheads. ’Course, that would work too. RaftTraff wouldn’t know which one of us to send the sec tugs after first.”
Mullytrock. Definitely Lady Sass. He remembered Ralland at fourteen getting his mouth washed out with soap for saying that.
Don't ignore the foul-language factor when creating your world. Take some time to see how and why and when we on this planet swear (references below cited to assist you with that), and integrate that knowledge with your alien or fantasy culture. Your readers-- and your characters-- will thank you. After all, your heroine does need something appropriate to say when she drops a sonic-wrench on her toe.
For Further Study:
Four-Letter Folk Etymology and the “Bald Anglo-Saxon Epithet" by Lauren Mahon
http://students.washington.edu/laurenem/fourletter.html
Constructed Human Languages
http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html
Maledicta Press - Uncensored Language Research
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/index.html
Elizabethean Insult Generator
http://www.sonic.net/maledicta/quickies.4.html
~Linnea
HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 24, 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: www.linneasinclair.com
“If we can’t do the impossible, then we need to at least be able to do the unexpected.” —Admiral Philip Guthrie
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Intelligent Design and Science Fiction
"Start with the sun," is great world-building advice. I think Jacqueline Lichtenberg told me that.
I'd like to say that my reaction was, "Oh, deadly wicked! A short cut!!!" but it wasn't. I'm not that quick on the draw.
I like to think that I'd start with a Big Bang or some equally scientifically plausible explanation for the galaxy or universe in which that star came into being, but it's inevitable that someone, somewhere has already had every thought imaginable. Including every permutation of "which came first: the egg, or the egg-layer?"
Terry Pratchett's Discworld reminds me of a Hindu story, which has been referenced by various great philosophers including John Locke, Hawking, spaceturtle.com, and Russell (not in that order!)
I studied Philosophy at Cambridge (flimsily, along with Sociology and Psychology as part of my combined Honours Education degree). I remember reading Russell's 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian. In it, while discounting the First Cause argument intended to be a proof of God's existence, Russell comments:
Elephants and tortoises and turtles don't make much sense to me. Nor do questions about what the tortoise was standing on, because loggerheads and leatherbacks swim.
But, where did the turtle come from? Are there other turtles? Other hitchhiking elephants?
And, if our world is the result of "Intelligent Design", why would an intelligent designer locate something as precious and beautiful as our planet (and everything on it) in a cosmic bowling alley or petanque terrain?
Was the Permian extinction an unintended consequence? Or deliberate? Were dinosaurs the prototype, but turned out TSTL?
Is our world a marble? A jack? A cush? A boule?
I recently learned to play petanque. There are a lot of games around the world that involve heavy orbs being rolled, bowled, thrown, tossed, or bowled at smaller, brighter spherical objects with the goal of getting as close as possible.
I realize that our star --Sol, the Sun-- is bigger, not smaller, than the planets around it. So the analogy doesn't hold up. Thank goodness. Or should that be, "Thank Goodness!"?
The premise behind The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was fanciful, too. Earth was bulldozed to make way for an intergalactic bypass.
Thinking of intergalactic super highways... a few years ago, the science channel had a fabulous documentary in which they imaginatively visited the eight or nine or ten planets or approximately habitable worlds in our solar system. At the time, we were thought to have nine, but I think Europa and IO were part of the tour. One planet was suggested to have seas of liquid petroleum.
I can imagine. We flew back from the UK over Greenland. Unusually, the cloud cover was sparse, and we could see the lakes and rivers between the mountains. The sun was low, and all the bodies of water looked orange. It was an incredible sight.
In the grander scale of things, I don't think any one school of thought or belief necessarily rules out any other.
Anyway, we write fiction. What makes a good story doesn't have to be what we believe, or limited to that of which we have empirical, demonstrable knowledge.
And... for intelligent design of another sort entirely, here's how to design a killer press release
I'd like to say that my reaction was, "Oh, deadly wicked! A short cut!!!" but it wasn't. I'm not that quick on the draw.
I like to think that I'd start with a Big Bang or some equally scientifically plausible explanation for the galaxy or universe in which that star came into being, but it's inevitable that someone, somewhere has already had every thought imaginable. Including every permutation of "which came first: the egg, or the egg-layer?"
Terry Pratchett's Discworld reminds me of a Hindu story, which has been referenced by various great philosophers including John Locke, Hawking, spaceturtle.com, and Russell (not in that order!)
I studied Philosophy at Cambridge (flimsily, along with Sociology and Psychology as part of my combined Honours Education degree). I remember reading Russell's 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian. In it, while discounting the First Cause argument intended to be a proof of God's existence, Russell comments:
“If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."
Elephants and tortoises and turtles don't make much sense to me. Nor do questions about what the tortoise was standing on, because loggerheads and leatherbacks swim.
But, where did the turtle come from? Are there other turtles? Other hitchhiking elephants?
And, if our world is the result of "Intelligent Design", why would an intelligent designer locate something as precious and beautiful as our planet (and everything on it) in a cosmic bowling alley or petanque terrain?
Was the Permian extinction an unintended consequence? Or deliberate? Were dinosaurs the prototype, but turned out TSTL?
Is our world a marble? A jack? A cush? A boule?
I recently learned to play petanque. There are a lot of games around the world that involve heavy orbs being rolled, bowled, thrown, tossed, or bowled at smaller, brighter spherical objects with the goal of getting as close as possible.
I realize that our star --Sol, the Sun-- is bigger, not smaller, than the planets around it. So the analogy doesn't hold up. Thank goodness. Or should that be, "Thank Goodness!"?
The premise behind The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was fanciful, too. Earth was bulldozed to make way for an intergalactic bypass.
Thinking of intergalactic super highways... a few years ago, the science channel had a fabulous documentary in which they imaginatively visited the eight or nine or ten planets or approximately habitable worlds in our solar system. At the time, we were thought to have nine, but I think Europa and IO were part of the tour. One planet was suggested to have seas of liquid petroleum.
I can imagine. We flew back from the UK over Greenland. Unusually, the cloud cover was sparse, and we could see the lakes and rivers between the mountains. The sun was low, and all the bodies of water looked orange. It was an incredible sight.
In the grander scale of things, I don't think any one school of thought or belief necessarily rules out any other.
Anyway, we write fiction. What makes a good story doesn't have to be what we believe, or limited to that of which we have empirical, demonstrable knowledge.
And... for intelligent design of another sort entirely, here's how to design a killer press release
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Is Literacy Doomed?
The latest CEMETERY DANCE (No. 59) contains an interview with distinguished British horror anthologist Stephen Jones. He views with alarm the state of literacy in general and the condition of mass market horror fiction (while remaining hopeful about the future of the genre, the demise of which has been predicted many times in the past). He says, “Most kids are leaving school sub-literate,” and, “Almost nobody reads these days.” He mourns the passing of the time when we used to “get our information from words.” He doesn’t count the information (and fiction) readers find on the Internet as worthy of notice. (While many newspapers and websites are part of the “dumbing down” process, as he says, surely not ALL are?) Jones considers blogs and personal websites a waste of an author’s time and lumps together all e-published and POD books with unedited, shoddily produced self-published releases.
Coincidentally, Thomas Monteleone’s column in the same issue laments declining standards of literacy among would-be writers, as demonstrated by the low quality of slush pile submissions. He points out an alarming frequency of misspellings that make it evident the writers are trying to write words they have never seen in print. In other words, even many aspiring authors aren’t necessarily readers—and I agree that trend IS alarming, if true. As Garrison Keillor says in today’s column, “Writing is an act of paying attention.” Disdain for the niceties of spelling, punctuation, and usage implies a distressing lack of care for one’s own work as well as the material one reads. Monteleone connects this plight with what he considers the disastrous state of education and general cultural literacy.
My overall reaction to the two CEMETERY DANCE articles is along the line of, “Calm down, get a grip, it’s not THAT bad.” Viewers-with-alarm seem to forget how novel the ideal of universal literacy is. In the “good old days” when people supposedly read lots of books and were well acquainted with literature and history, those who attended high school, let alone graduated, were in the minority. Even in my youth (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I suspect the “bad” kids were either expelled long before graduation or at least not discouraged from dropping out. Nowadays, schools pursue the goal of having all students complete a secondary education. So of course the average gets pulled down, now that high school students represent the entire population rather than a select group (the group those people nostalgic for the good old days are actually thinking of when they compare yesterday's level of public education with today's). Meanwhile, a college degree has become the entry-level employment qualification that a high school diploma used to be. So of course everybody is urged to go to college, even if not well prepared, because they may find themselves jobless otherwise.
As Isaac Asimov pointed out in one of his essays, people who voluntarily read for pleasure have always been a minority. Only the competing leisure activities have changed. As for the legitimate causes for alarm that do exist, in my opinion it doesn’t help a bit to dismiss wholesale all instances of new formats, e.g. e-publishing and POD, as substandard and inauthentic. Does anyone seriously believe the comparatively few books for which mass market publishers have room on their lists exhaust the number of good submissions they’ve received? Small presses and other alternative publication venues give those worthy-but-rejected books a chance to find a home. The widening and varying of the fiction delivery system, to me, is something to be celebrated. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law holds true; 90 percent of everything is junk, and maybe the ease of online publication makes the 90 percent more visible. The other 10 percent, however, should have fresh opportunities find its audience in this “brave new world” reading environment.
Coincidentally, Thomas Monteleone’s column in the same issue laments declining standards of literacy among would-be writers, as demonstrated by the low quality of slush pile submissions. He points out an alarming frequency of misspellings that make it evident the writers are trying to write words they have never seen in print. In other words, even many aspiring authors aren’t necessarily readers—and I agree that trend IS alarming, if true. As Garrison Keillor says in today’s column, “Writing is an act of paying attention.” Disdain for the niceties of spelling, punctuation, and usage implies a distressing lack of care for one’s own work as well as the material one reads. Monteleone connects this plight with what he considers the disastrous state of education and general cultural literacy.
My overall reaction to the two CEMETERY DANCE articles is along the line of, “Calm down, get a grip, it’s not THAT bad.” Viewers-with-alarm seem to forget how novel the ideal of universal literacy is. In the “good old days” when people supposedly read lots of books and were well acquainted with literature and history, those who attended high school, let alone graduated, were in the minority. Even in my youth (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I suspect the “bad” kids were either expelled long before graduation or at least not discouraged from dropping out. Nowadays, schools pursue the goal of having all students complete a secondary education. So of course the average gets pulled down, now that high school students represent the entire population rather than a select group (the group those people nostalgic for the good old days are actually thinking of when they compare yesterday's level of public education with today's). Meanwhile, a college degree has become the entry-level employment qualification that a high school diploma used to be. So of course everybody is urged to go to college, even if not well prepared, because they may find themselves jobless otherwise.
As Isaac Asimov pointed out in one of his essays, people who voluntarily read for pleasure have always been a minority. Only the competing leisure activities have changed. As for the legitimate causes for alarm that do exist, in my opinion it doesn’t help a bit to dismiss wholesale all instances of new formats, e.g. e-publishing and POD, as substandard and inauthentic. Does anyone seriously believe the comparatively few books for which mass market publishers have room on their lists exhaust the number of good submissions they’ve received? Small presses and other alternative publication venues give those worthy-but-rejected books a chance to find a home. The widening and varying of the fiction delivery system, to me, is something to be celebrated. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law holds true; 90 percent of everything is junk, and maybe the ease of online publication makes the 90 percent more visible. The other 10 percent, however, should have fresh opportunities find its audience in this “brave new world” reading environment.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Expletive-Deleted & Tender Romance
But First! -- Linnea stole my thunder by quoting me and the point I'm making in this post in her post that comes right before this one.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-dont-understand-she-shouted-angrily.html
Linnea said:
Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact ...
Linnea goes on to point out how handy a good argument is for sprinkling in crushed-expository-lumps so the reader doesn't notice them.
Anger is a good special case of the general key to great DIALOGUE.
ALL DIALOGUE IS CONFLICT.
That's a principle. Dialogue is generated by PLOT, and the basis is conflict. Every scene must have "rising action" (the tension, anticipation of plot-movement, and the movement of the plot must graph from a low to end on a HIGH NOTE). That's a stageplay writing principle that works on TV and in books.
Even sex scene dialogue is generated by conflict that is resolved at the climax.
If the scene does not encapsulate this principle -- conflict/ resolution -- then cut it. All dialogue must carry the conflict. Anything characters say to each other that isn't CONFLICT gets cut, summarized, happens off stage, is overheard in fragments, or referred to in another confrontation.
One thing people revert to when inarticulate with rage (angry enough to let you insert backstory) is invective, and other words that don't say anything but take up precious space in your story.
So today I want to discuss the interjection and expletive in dialogue, whereas in my post --
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
-- I was addressing the general problem of creating the illusion of reality, using dialogue as an example because I assumed everyone reading this blog had mastered dialogue.
The principles I discussed in "Versimilitude vs Reality" actually apply neatly to Kimber An's comment (on Linnea's post on dialogue) that Kimber An sees IMAGES and can't do the description well, but has no trouble with dialogue. And I answered in the comments section that when you can't write the description, the problem is in the dialogue. When the dialogue FAILS, the description can't materialize.
That's extremely hard for anyone to grasp who hasn't taught writing, hands-on, with beginner's manuscripts. Most editors can't do this either. But when a story falls off the conflict line at the half-way point, the problem is not at the half-way point, but probably on PAGE ONE -- or possibly PAGE 5. When an ENDING fails to meld properly with the final climax, the problem is very likely at the 1/4 point, or possibly the 1/2 point.
It's kind of like chiropractic medicine. The patient comes in and says "My knee hurts." -- and the doctor pokes and says, "Ah, your neck is out."
A body is an organic whole, a thing of a single piece. The location of the cause and the symptom may not coincide.
Likewise a story is also a work of art (humans are G-d's artwork), and an organic WHOLE, much greater than the sum of the parts we've been discussing. Thus if a problem surfaces at one point, the cause is likely at some other point -- or in some other technique that's not in the writer's tool box.
EXERCISE: Write a radio script -- or a vignette to play out on a limbo set (against total blackness). Or two prisoners in adjacent dungeon cells. Absolutely not one word of anything but dialogue. If you want my analysis of this exercise, post it to
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/ Readers should read this dialogue and post on editingcircle.blogspot.com what the dialogue MADE THEM VISUALIZE.
I've posted the above prolog to Editing Circle, so just click to add your exercise as a comment.
So for now, let's meditate on the idea that in storytelling, description is not description at all - but the ILLUSION OF DESCRIPTION. It is a bare suggestion that the reader then paints by the numbers in their own mind's eye. Part of that suggestion lies within dialogue. When description fails, dialogue is the problem. The illusion of speech has failed, somehow.
The kinds of writers who have the most trouble with this "illusion of" principle are the sort who did well in school, or maybe became teachers (especially HS or College!). They've spent too much time reading and writing the actual thing and can't convert themselves to manipulating the illusion of the thing.
Learning to cast that illusion without limiting what the reader sees (or hears, tastes, smells, etc), learning to get your own visualization of what the location looks like out of the story, is hard.
So practice for the moment on something much easier -- the illusion of speech. Dialogue. And then I have to remember to connect dialogue back to description and show you how they interact. All the individual components of story we've been discussing all interact. In math, you call that "cross-terms."
The principle is the same with all the techniques of fiction writing. Learn this principle and it will affect how you handle description, dialogue, narrative, action, and (gasp!) exposition.
Yes, you do need SOME exposition. To keep exposition from "lumping" -- you learn how to create the illusion of exposition, not exposition itself (such as you'd read in a textbook).
So, now to today's discussion of interjections, expletives, and specifically invective. I recently put aside a review book because a huge percentage of it was cuss words (those usually acceptable in polite company, too) and that book was published by a big publisher. So I had to analyze what went wrong with it -- and here below is the result.
----------------------
Expletive Deleted & Tender Romance
On this Alien Romance blog, we've discussed the use of racey word choices in sex scenes, and many other vocabulary issues writers face. Let's take a closer look at characterization and vocabulary.
Can you write a SAVE THE CAT! moment (see Blake Snyder's books series on screenwriting titled SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES) just using vocabulary?
I think so, but it'll take some study of vocabulary and characterization.
Most beginning books on writing emphasize vocabulary building, though it's not such a focus topic in grammar school and High School any more.
But it's still true that in Business, politics, and even war, people judge you and your character -- your abilities and deficiencies -- on your word choices.
Syntax counts, too.
Today we acknowledge more English dialects as being legitimate expressions, and so we see more novels and films made with characters who speak with an accent or in dialect.
The advice given all beginning writers is NOT to tweek your spelling to indicate a character's dialect or accent. It makes it very hard to read, and in today's express-lane lifestyle, people scan fast. I would follow that advice, far into advanced skill levels. Robert A. Heinlein did one book in heavy dialect spelled out (MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS) and did it well, but never again. Take a lesson there.
You can use word-choice to delineate character without getting into pronunciation.
Even in screenwriting, it isn't wise to put in twisted spelling to indicate a character's pronunciation. Actors will create accent as they create the character.
And you know what? Readers create accents in their minds when they want to.
So let the reader create, and thus become invested in your characters.
However, you as writer, must provide the outline for the reader to flesh out -- as a coloring book provides only B&W line drawings for kids to color in.
One way many beginning writers grab immediately to delineate a character's class, education level, strength of will, and general attitude is to pepper the character's dialogue with normal-sounding, ordinary-seeming invective.
As I noted in my post Verisimilitude-vs-Reality
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
dialogue is not REAL SPEECH.
Real people of a certain social stripe will insert the F-word before almost every noun. Or vary it only with the D-word, or H-word. (I don't want this post scrapped by the censors.)
Characters who use these insertions come off sounding (in the reader's mind) like talk show guests who say "um" and "you-know" before imparting any information. Frustrating, untrustworthy, and not comprehensible.
Of course we don't know! That's why we asked! So why say "you know" four times in every sentence?
It's a speech rhythm habit you hear all the time in normal speech. What you hear, you imitate. That's how people pick up the F, D and H word inserts and blurt them out even when the word adds no meaning and expresses no actual emotional content.
Public speakers are trained (or mostly trained) to suppress that "You know" and "um" interjection.
"You know" is not invective, but if you listen with a writer's ear to real speech you will find it fills the same void in an utterance that invective often does.
It's what you say when you don't know what you're going to say.
Even mild invective (or perhaps especially mild invective) performs the same function.
If you study Linguistics and anthropology together, you will find long discourses and detailed studies showing how those of various societies communicate the old Two-Way-Radio command "Over". It's still used in Ham Radio. It's a clear verbal signal that you're giving up your turn to talk.
In normal speech the signal can be a pause, an eyeblink, an inflection in tone, or some combination of all that plus something else. But we do have, in every social millieu, an "I'm done; it's your turn to say something" signal that is very formalized and very necessary to keep interactions from becoming combat.
With English, the usual rule is that if the other person is making a sound with their voice, then it is rude to start talking. So we learn to fill in the necessary pauses in speech (when you're making up what you say as you go) with um, uh, you-know, and other temporizing interjections or invective that don't mean anything except "it's still my turn to talk."
With cold text, however, putting those interjections or invective into dialogue tends to shut the reader out of participating in what the character is saying, and of being the character who is saying it.
The cold-text reader who is caught up in the emotions of the scene will slow down and read the dialogue at an out-loud pace, creating the tense silences, the awkward pauses, the blank moments, listening with their own inner ear.
If you fill the pauses with placeholders, you shut the reader out of entering into the character's mind and emotions.
Now, sometimes, artistically, you want to do that.
Sometimes you want to show how nervous a character is, or how uneducated. Sometimes the speech pattern is part of a disguise of a deep cover agent talking just like the people being spied on.
There are times you must do it, so you must study how it's done.
And remember dialogue is NOT real speech but the illusion of real speech. Illusion.
Also storytelling is an art. The secret of great art lies with discipline. It is what you do not put on the page that powers your art.
Consider the artistic impact of a clean-mouthed Hero -- right at the climactic moment -- using a blazing hot curse. If he's been cursing every third word all the way through the story, it has no impact. If it's the only time he uses such language, it carries searingly hot emotion to the reader.
Shock value. You get it not by ladling on tons of extra colorful expletives, but by inserting one, just one, in the exactly correct place, and choosing that exact word to mean precisely what has to be said at that point.
Most often, in real speech, when people use the D word for example, they really are not referring to the Creator of the Universe and commanding Him to do their bidding.
What they really mean is something more like, "My will has been thwarted" or "I didn't expect that and I should have" or "I dislike this thing" or "I have no respect for this thing."
Alien Romance Writers who are doing from-scratch worldbuilding have an opportunity to build into the scientific basis of their world a function or process that does not exist in our world. Such an alien process can generate unique invective.
I did that with Sime~Gen -- and the vocabulary that is never used in polite Sime company is based on the experience of a transfer interruption. Shen. Shen comes in various levels of severity, shen, shenshi, shenshay, shenshid etc. (for Sime vocabulary see:
http://www.simegen.com/jl/nivetsoundfiles/ )
"Adult" filters won't block this post for containing those Sime words -- but they would in Sime society!
What is it about invective such as the F-word that makes it be rejected by "polite society?"
The D-word, the F-word, and the Sh-word, and all their derivatives, refer to an intimate act.
Your relationship with your deity; your relationship with necessary but despised partners; your relationship with your body's demands.
These are almost as intimate and personal as what Shen refers to.
It is that dimension of personal, spiritual, individual, deep psychological relevance that gives invective its power when used out-of-context.
The deeply intimate used in public.
The deeply religious used in the profane context.
The utterly profane used in a religious context.
Take the vocabulary or jargon of one process and splatter it over a situation belonging to a different process, and you can create your own invective, alien invective, that won't be censored but will make readers memorize your byline.
So then how do you use invective to characterize if you can't copy real speech where interjections form the bulk of the utterance?
That depends on your readership or audience. People judge other people on their speech patterns, accent, rhythms, choice of words -- but most of all upon their ability (or inability) to express themselves with precision.
Characters you want the reader to respect must speak with the kind of precision used normally by the reader -- even if the word is banned-in-polite-company and the dialogue is taking place in polite company.
Characters you want the reader to understand as uneducated or uneducable may use words to express emotions even if the words are imprecise and inappropriate.
An admirable character reduced by events (such as the kind of argument Linnea Sinclair's characters get into) to a gibbering idiot might stomp out of the room spewing an inarticulate string of D-words.
As a rule of thumb, emotion wipes out the higher intellect's ability to phrase meaning, or even to think. (yeah, the S-x scene, and talking dirty on purpose -- it has a fiery effect when an articulate and erudite character chooses to talk dirty in PRIVATE with a willing partner, especially if it's been established he/she doesn't have that kind of colorful vocabulary.)
So a given character's ability to express meaning should change with the emotional intensity of the scene. How the character's articulateness shifts with emotion characterizes him/her more than any given level of articulateness could.
And that, I think, is the key to the Alien Romance "Save The Cat!" moment -- the moment when the reader is sucked into sympathy with or into identifying with the character because the character displays a trait that bespeaks a "good soul."
The real character inside the shell shows through the coarse crust and you see the intellect, self-respect, and integrity that makes a person a candidate for a life-long relationship rather than a one-night-stand.
That is you can establish your characters' mental acuity and even morality by their speech patterns, but if a character uses the same speech pattern in every scene he/she is in -- you aren't being effective in using dialogue to characterize.
Anthropology also studies the differences in vocabulary and speech patterns in public, private and among all women, and among all men. Vocabulary is often gender-specific to the company.
A character who displays a lack of that flexibility (Star Trek's Spock for example) betrays an element of character that readers/viewers will interpret according to their own culture.
Spock was considered repressed and up-tight by many American viewers because of that inflexibility in public and private manner.
My own Star Trek alternate universe, the Kraith Universe, points out that human anthropological rules don't apply to Vulcans and Spock's speech patterns are Vulcan. His inflexibility actually implies something very alien indeed, not repression. Many readers were unable to grasp this point.
See my Kraith Universe stories here:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/
We all know what a sex object Spock became, the alure enhanced mightily by his half-alien ancestry. And we know how - um - well, you know, uh, logically - he expressed himself most of the time.
Then there's Hans Solo. Also hot stuff, but very human. Luke Skywalker was no slouch in that department either.
To acquire a facility with writing dialogue for non-human hot-stuff, do a contrast/compare between Spock, Hans Solo, and some icon of your own choosing.
Ask yourself what sort of woman would be attracted to a man she heard spouting filth (whatever she thought filth was, but the reader might not hear it that way) then turning to her and cooing tender language at her.
What would she think of another man who spoke to her the blistering way he spoke to a foul mouthed guy?
What do we tell the world by the kind of mouth we run?
But more important -- what do your readers and your editors think about foul mouthed characters as icons? (puts one in mind of some Oscar nominees, I think).
The most important thing to do to learn to handle vocabulary in dialogue is to listen to both dialogue and real speech and become sensitive to vocabulary choices.
But that's easier said than done. Here is a handy rule of thumb that works to solve most writing problems:
RULE:
Less Is More.
APPLICATION TO TEXT CRAFTING:
Delete ALL adjectives and adverbs from your text. Replace the Noun or Verb they modify with another vocabulary choice with the combined meaning.
Expletives are a "modifyer" in the same category as adjectives and adverbs -- delete the modifyer, change the word modified to mean precisely what the combination would mean.
Above all, always keep your targeted reader in mind. Use words found only in the OED when addressing a readership that would be thrilled to discover a rare but perfect word. Always aim to stretch your reader's vocabulary - being sure to explain the meaning of the word by the context.
I can imagine a really hot romance between an anthropologist and a linguist assigned to study and map the languages of Earth today. What beautiful arguments they could have over the OED - to make up after.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.slantedconcept.com
PS: if you're having a hard time finding these scattered posts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg on writing craft, you may want to "subscribe" so you get notified when and where they turn up. Here's how.
ABOUT SUBSCRIBING to BLOGS
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/you-dont-understand-she-shouted-angrily.html
Linnea said:
Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact ...
Linnea goes on to point out how handy a good argument is for sprinkling in crushed-expository-lumps so the reader doesn't notice them.
Anger is a good special case of the general key to great DIALOGUE.
ALL DIALOGUE IS CONFLICT.
That's a principle. Dialogue is generated by PLOT, and the basis is conflict. Every scene must have "rising action" (the tension, anticipation of plot-movement, and the movement of the plot must graph from a low to end on a HIGH NOTE). That's a stageplay writing principle that works on TV and in books.
Even sex scene dialogue is generated by conflict that is resolved at the climax.
If the scene does not encapsulate this principle -- conflict/ resolution -- then cut it. All dialogue must carry the conflict. Anything characters say to each other that isn't CONFLICT gets cut, summarized, happens off stage, is overheard in fragments, or referred to in another confrontation.
One thing people revert to when inarticulate with rage (angry enough to let you insert backstory) is invective, and other words that don't say anything but take up precious space in your story.
So today I want to discuss the interjection and expletive in dialogue, whereas in my post --
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
-- I was addressing the general problem of creating the illusion of reality, using dialogue as an example because I assumed everyone reading this blog had mastered dialogue.
The principles I discussed in "Versimilitude vs Reality" actually apply neatly to Kimber An's comment (on Linnea's post on dialogue) that Kimber An sees IMAGES and can't do the description well, but has no trouble with dialogue. And I answered in the comments section that when you can't write the description, the problem is in the dialogue. When the dialogue FAILS, the description can't materialize.
That's extremely hard for anyone to grasp who hasn't taught writing, hands-on, with beginner's manuscripts. Most editors can't do this either. But when a story falls off the conflict line at the half-way point, the problem is not at the half-way point, but probably on PAGE ONE -- or possibly PAGE 5. When an ENDING fails to meld properly with the final climax, the problem is very likely at the 1/4 point, or possibly the 1/2 point.
It's kind of like chiropractic medicine. The patient comes in and says "My knee hurts." -- and the doctor pokes and says, "Ah, your neck is out."
A body is an organic whole, a thing of a single piece. The location of the cause and the symptom may not coincide.
Likewise a story is also a work of art (humans are G-d's artwork), and an organic WHOLE, much greater than the sum of the parts we've been discussing. Thus if a problem surfaces at one point, the cause is likely at some other point -- or in some other technique that's not in the writer's tool box.
EXERCISE: Write a radio script -- or a vignette to play out on a limbo set (against total blackness). Or two prisoners in adjacent dungeon cells. Absolutely not one word of anything but dialogue. If you want my analysis of this exercise, post it to
http://editingcircle.blogspot.com/ Readers should read this dialogue and post on editingcircle.blogspot.com what the dialogue MADE THEM VISUALIZE.
I've posted the above prolog to Editing Circle, so just click to add your exercise as a comment.
So for now, let's meditate on the idea that in storytelling, description is not description at all - but the ILLUSION OF DESCRIPTION. It is a bare suggestion that the reader then paints by the numbers in their own mind's eye. Part of that suggestion lies within dialogue. When description fails, dialogue is the problem. The illusion of speech has failed, somehow.
The kinds of writers who have the most trouble with this "illusion of" principle are the sort who did well in school, or maybe became teachers (especially HS or College!). They've spent too much time reading and writing the actual thing and can't convert themselves to manipulating the illusion of the thing.
Learning to cast that illusion without limiting what the reader sees (or hears, tastes, smells, etc), learning to get your own visualization of what the location looks like out of the story, is hard.
So practice for the moment on something much easier -- the illusion of speech. Dialogue. And then I have to remember to connect dialogue back to description and show you how they interact. All the individual components of story we've been discussing all interact. In math, you call that "cross-terms."
The principle is the same with all the techniques of fiction writing. Learn this principle and it will affect how you handle description, dialogue, narrative, action, and (gasp!) exposition.
Yes, you do need SOME exposition. To keep exposition from "lumping" -- you learn how to create the illusion of exposition, not exposition itself (such as you'd read in a textbook).
So, now to today's discussion of interjections, expletives, and specifically invective. I recently put aside a review book because a huge percentage of it was cuss words (those usually acceptable in polite company, too) and that book was published by a big publisher. So I had to analyze what went wrong with it -- and here below is the result.
----------------------
Expletive Deleted & Tender Romance
On this Alien Romance blog, we've discussed the use of racey word choices in sex scenes, and many other vocabulary issues writers face. Let's take a closer look at characterization and vocabulary.
Can you write a SAVE THE CAT! moment (see Blake Snyder's books series on screenwriting titled SAVE THE CAT! and SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES) just using vocabulary?
I think so, but it'll take some study of vocabulary and characterization.
Most beginning books on writing emphasize vocabulary building, though it's not such a focus topic in grammar school and High School any more.
But it's still true that in Business, politics, and even war, people judge you and your character -- your abilities and deficiencies -- on your word choices.
Syntax counts, too.
Today we acknowledge more English dialects as being legitimate expressions, and so we see more novels and films made with characters who speak with an accent or in dialect.
The advice given all beginning writers is NOT to tweek your spelling to indicate a character's dialect or accent. It makes it very hard to read, and in today's express-lane lifestyle, people scan fast. I would follow that advice, far into advanced skill levels. Robert A. Heinlein did one book in heavy dialect spelled out (MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS) and did it well, but never again. Take a lesson there.
You can use word-choice to delineate character without getting into pronunciation.
Even in screenwriting, it isn't wise to put in twisted spelling to indicate a character's pronunciation. Actors will create accent as they create the character.
And you know what? Readers create accents in their minds when they want to.
So let the reader create, and thus become invested in your characters.
However, you as writer, must provide the outline for the reader to flesh out -- as a coloring book provides only B&W line drawings for kids to color in.
One way many beginning writers grab immediately to delineate a character's class, education level, strength of will, and general attitude is to pepper the character's dialogue with normal-sounding, ordinary-seeming invective.
As I noted in my post Verisimilitude-vs-Reality
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html
dialogue is not REAL SPEECH.
Real people of a certain social stripe will insert the F-word before almost every noun. Or vary it only with the D-word, or H-word. (I don't want this post scrapped by the censors.)
Characters who use these insertions come off sounding (in the reader's mind) like talk show guests who say "um" and "you-know" before imparting any information. Frustrating, untrustworthy, and not comprehensible.
Of course we don't know! That's why we asked! So why say "you know" four times in every sentence?
It's a speech rhythm habit you hear all the time in normal speech. What you hear, you imitate. That's how people pick up the F, D and H word inserts and blurt them out even when the word adds no meaning and expresses no actual emotional content.
Public speakers are trained (or mostly trained) to suppress that "You know" and "um" interjection.
"You know" is not invective, but if you listen with a writer's ear to real speech you will find it fills the same void in an utterance that invective often does.
It's what you say when you don't know what you're going to say.
Even mild invective (or perhaps especially mild invective) performs the same function.
If you study Linguistics and anthropology together, you will find long discourses and detailed studies showing how those of various societies communicate the old Two-Way-Radio command "Over". It's still used in Ham Radio. It's a clear verbal signal that you're giving up your turn to talk.
In normal speech the signal can be a pause, an eyeblink, an inflection in tone, or some combination of all that plus something else. But we do have, in every social millieu, an "I'm done; it's your turn to say something" signal that is very formalized and very necessary to keep interactions from becoming combat.
With English, the usual rule is that if the other person is making a sound with their voice, then it is rude to start talking. So we learn to fill in the necessary pauses in speech (when you're making up what you say as you go) with um, uh, you-know, and other temporizing interjections or invective that don't mean anything except "it's still my turn to talk."
With cold text, however, putting those interjections or invective into dialogue tends to shut the reader out of participating in what the character is saying, and of being the character who is saying it.
The cold-text reader who is caught up in the emotions of the scene will slow down and read the dialogue at an out-loud pace, creating the tense silences, the awkward pauses, the blank moments, listening with their own inner ear.
If you fill the pauses with placeholders, you shut the reader out of entering into the character's mind and emotions.
Now, sometimes, artistically, you want to do that.
Sometimes you want to show how nervous a character is, or how uneducated. Sometimes the speech pattern is part of a disguise of a deep cover agent talking just like the people being spied on.
There are times you must do it, so you must study how it's done.
And remember dialogue is NOT real speech but the illusion of real speech. Illusion.
Also storytelling is an art. The secret of great art lies with discipline. It is what you do not put on the page that powers your art.
Consider the artistic impact of a clean-mouthed Hero -- right at the climactic moment -- using a blazing hot curse. If he's been cursing every third word all the way through the story, it has no impact. If it's the only time he uses such language, it carries searingly hot emotion to the reader.
Shock value. You get it not by ladling on tons of extra colorful expletives, but by inserting one, just one, in the exactly correct place, and choosing that exact word to mean precisely what has to be said at that point.
Most often, in real speech, when people use the D word for example, they really are not referring to the Creator of the Universe and commanding Him to do their bidding.
What they really mean is something more like, "My will has been thwarted" or "I didn't expect that and I should have" or "I dislike this thing" or "I have no respect for this thing."
Alien Romance Writers who are doing from-scratch worldbuilding have an opportunity to build into the scientific basis of their world a function or process that does not exist in our world. Such an alien process can generate unique invective.
I did that with Sime~Gen -- and the vocabulary that is never used in polite Sime company is based on the experience of a transfer interruption. Shen. Shen comes in various levels of severity, shen, shenshi, shenshay, shenshid etc. (for Sime vocabulary see:
http://www.simegen.com/jl/nivetsoundfiles/ )
"Adult" filters won't block this post for containing those Sime words -- but they would in Sime society!
What is it about invective such as the F-word that makes it be rejected by "polite society?"
The D-word, the F-word, and the Sh-word, and all their derivatives, refer to an intimate act.
Your relationship with your deity; your relationship with necessary but despised partners; your relationship with your body's demands.
These are almost as intimate and personal as what Shen refers to.
It is that dimension of personal, spiritual, individual, deep psychological relevance that gives invective its power when used out-of-context.
The deeply intimate used in public.
The deeply religious used in the profane context.
The utterly profane used in a religious context.
Take the vocabulary or jargon of one process and splatter it over a situation belonging to a different process, and you can create your own invective, alien invective, that won't be censored but will make readers memorize your byline.
So then how do you use invective to characterize if you can't copy real speech where interjections form the bulk of the utterance?
That depends on your readership or audience. People judge other people on their speech patterns, accent, rhythms, choice of words -- but most of all upon their ability (or inability) to express themselves with precision.
Characters you want the reader to respect must speak with the kind of precision used normally by the reader -- even if the word is banned-in-polite-company and the dialogue is taking place in polite company.
Characters you want the reader to understand as uneducated or uneducable may use words to express emotions even if the words are imprecise and inappropriate.
An admirable character reduced by events (such as the kind of argument Linnea Sinclair's characters get into) to a gibbering idiot might stomp out of the room spewing an inarticulate string of D-words.
As a rule of thumb, emotion wipes out the higher intellect's ability to phrase meaning, or even to think. (yeah, the S-x scene, and talking dirty on purpose -- it has a fiery effect when an articulate and erudite character chooses to talk dirty in PRIVATE with a willing partner, especially if it's been established he/she doesn't have that kind of colorful vocabulary.)
So a given character's ability to express meaning should change with the emotional intensity of the scene. How the character's articulateness shifts with emotion characterizes him/her more than any given level of articulateness could.
And that, I think, is the key to the Alien Romance "Save The Cat!" moment -- the moment when the reader is sucked into sympathy with or into identifying with the character because the character displays a trait that bespeaks a "good soul."
The real character inside the shell shows through the coarse crust and you see the intellect, self-respect, and integrity that makes a person a candidate for a life-long relationship rather than a one-night-stand.
That is you can establish your characters' mental acuity and even morality by their speech patterns, but if a character uses the same speech pattern in every scene he/she is in -- you aren't being effective in using dialogue to characterize.
Anthropology also studies the differences in vocabulary and speech patterns in public, private and among all women, and among all men. Vocabulary is often gender-specific to the company.
A character who displays a lack of that flexibility (Star Trek's Spock for example) betrays an element of character that readers/viewers will interpret according to their own culture.
Spock was considered repressed and up-tight by many American viewers because of that inflexibility in public and private manner.
My own Star Trek alternate universe, the Kraith Universe, points out that human anthropological rules don't apply to Vulcans and Spock's speech patterns are Vulcan. His inflexibility actually implies something very alien indeed, not repression. Many readers were unable to grasp this point.
See my Kraith Universe stories here:
http://www.simegen.com/fandom/startrek/
We all know what a sex object Spock became, the alure enhanced mightily by his half-alien ancestry. And we know how - um - well, you know, uh, logically - he expressed himself most of the time.
Then there's Hans Solo. Also hot stuff, but very human. Luke Skywalker was no slouch in that department either.
To acquire a facility with writing dialogue for non-human hot-stuff, do a contrast/compare between Spock, Hans Solo, and some icon of your own choosing.
Ask yourself what sort of woman would be attracted to a man she heard spouting filth (whatever she thought filth was, but the reader might not hear it that way) then turning to her and cooing tender language at her.
What would she think of another man who spoke to her the blistering way he spoke to a foul mouthed guy?
What do we tell the world by the kind of mouth we run?
But more important -- what do your readers and your editors think about foul mouthed characters as icons? (puts one in mind of some Oscar nominees, I think).
The most important thing to do to learn to handle vocabulary in dialogue is to listen to both dialogue and real speech and become sensitive to vocabulary choices.
But that's easier said than done. Here is a handy rule of thumb that works to solve most writing problems:
RULE:
Less Is More.
APPLICATION TO TEXT CRAFTING:
Delete ALL adjectives and adverbs from your text. Replace the Noun or Verb they modify with another vocabulary choice with the combined meaning.
Expletives are a "modifyer" in the same category as adjectives and adverbs -- delete the modifyer, change the word modified to mean precisely what the combination would mean.
Above all, always keep your targeted reader in mind. Use words found only in the OED when addressing a readership that would be thrilled to discover a rare but perfect word. Always aim to stretch your reader's vocabulary - being sure to explain the meaning of the word by the context.
I can imagine a really hot romance between an anthropologist and a linguist assigned to study and map the languages of Earth today. What beautiful arguments they could have over the OED - to make up after.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://www.slantedconcept.com
PS: if you're having a hard time finding these scattered posts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg on writing craft, you may want to "subscribe" so you get notified when and where they turn up. Here's how.
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http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-love-web-20.html
Monday, February 02, 2009
"You don't understand!" she shouted angrily...
Yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about silly titles for my blogs...
Be that as it may, I'm again using Jacqueline's blog last week on dialogue as the theme for my blog on dialogue in commercial genre fiction. Fictional dialogue is not a verbatim recording, not a play-by-play or blow-by-blow. Its purpose in a novel is not veracity but excitement. If, as Swain said, readers read to experience tension, there is nothing less tense than actual conversation.
Character dialogue, like every other part of the story, needs to move the plot along and ramp up the emotions. Without sounding silly, false, strained or trite.
Daunting?
Less so than you think, if for no other reason than good dialogue is out there. You're not being asked, in writing dialogue, to do something no writer has ever done. You're being asked to do what's been done and do it as well, if not better. You have role models. You have templates. You have a plethora of writing-how-to books and blogs like this.
The trick is applying what you learn.
Here's my favorite dialogue writing tip: get your characters angry (hence the title of this blog).
I'll explain why this works in a moment. But first, let's revisit what Jacqueline said: fiction is an illusion and fictional dialogue is an illusion of speech. That means word choice is essential. Placement and cadence is a must. Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact
But dialogue is also very often the writer's tool to impart needed information because (good) dialogue moves more quickly than narrative.
So what's the writer to do if she has a good chunk of information that--gasp!--might even have a tinge of backstory, and she needs somehow to get that before the reader without having it seem like an info dump
Get the characters angry. Why
Listen to any angry conversation between friends, lovers, strangers. I know. I said fictional dialogue isn't real dialogue but there are some similarities. The one time it feels "natural" for people to explain something in detail, or for people to recount the past, is when they're having an argument. It's a defensive thing: I'm angry with you because... and then the laundry list of past foibles comes out
Anger is a really good way to sneak some back story in.
In Shades of Dark, tensions are building between Captain Chaz Bergren and her lover, Gabriel "Sully" Sullivan, due in part to a new crewmember on their ship: a Stolorth Ragkiril named Del. Del is self-assured, flirtations, confident, aggressive and sexy as all get out. He's also supremely dangerous--something Chaz senses more than Sully does.
“We’re underfunded, understaffed. You’ll be serving—quite possibly fighting—under conditions you’ve never faced before. Being a rebel is not the glamour and glory the vids make it out to be.”
“The danger doesn’t concern you?”
“Danger concerns any good officer. But I’m ImpSec, sir. Special Protection Service.”
“Polite, professional, and prepared to kill?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded slowly. “And if I put you in the same room with the man responsible for the death of your father, and handed you a Carver-Twelve, would you be able to press the trigger?”
Did he really doubt that? “Absolutely, sir.”
He pulled his Carver out of the right side of his shoulder holster and held it up toward her. The grip of a second Carver—another 12, she thought—curved out of the left side.
She took it, not understanding. Did he mean for her to carry his weapon? A small thrill raced through her. Okay, it wasn’t that small. A Carver-12, and his as well. It was still warm from the heat of his body.
“Why haven’t you pressed the trigger?” he asked quietly.
Be that as it may, I'm again using Jacqueline's blog last week on dialogue as the theme for my blog on dialogue in commercial genre fiction. Fictional dialogue is not a verbatim recording, not a play-by-play or blow-by-blow. Its purpose in a novel is not veracity but excitement. If, as Swain said, readers read to experience tension, there is nothing less tense than actual conversation.
Character dialogue, like every other part of the story, needs to move the plot along and ramp up the emotions. Without sounding silly, false, strained or trite.
Daunting?
Less so than you think, if for no other reason than good dialogue is out there. You're not being asked, in writing dialogue, to do something no writer has ever done. You're being asked to do what's been done and do it as well, if not better. You have role models. You have templates. You have a plethora of writing-how-to books and blogs like this.
The trick is applying what you learn.
Here's my favorite dialogue writing tip: get your characters angry (hence the title of this blog).
I'll explain why this works in a moment. But first, let's revisit what Jacqueline said: fiction is an illusion and fictional dialogue is an illusion of speech. That means word choice is essential. Placement and cadence is a must. Real people ramble on with loads of 'umms' and 'yunnos' and 'dudes' and 'uhs.' Characters should keep those kinds of things to a bare minimum. Good dialogue goes for the vital organs, which in this case should be the reader's heart and brain. In that way, it's not unlike poetry or song writing. Good dialogue has impact
But dialogue is also very often the writer's tool to impart needed information because (good) dialogue moves more quickly than narrative.
So what's the writer to do if she has a good chunk of information that--gasp!--might even have a tinge of backstory, and she needs somehow to get that before the reader without having it seem like an info dump
Get the characters angry. Why
Listen to any angry conversation between friends, lovers, strangers. I know. I said fictional dialogue isn't real dialogue but there are some similarities. The one time it feels "natural" for people to explain something in detail, or for people to recount the past, is when they're having an argument. It's a defensive thing: I'm angry with you because... and then the laundry list of past foibles comes out
Anger is a really good way to sneak some back story in.
In Shades of Dark, tensions are building between Captain Chaz Bergren and her lover, Gabriel "Sully" Sullivan, due in part to a new crewmember on their ship: a Stolorth Ragkiril named Del. Del is self-assured, flirtations, confident, aggressive and sexy as all get out. He's also supremely dangerous--something Chaz senses more than Sully does.
In this little snippet of dialogue, Chaz "dumps" her reasons on Sully in a telepathic conversation. But it also serves to bring the reader up to speed with some of the basics in the conflict and reminds them of things they may have forgotten:
I was standing under the steamy streams of the ship’s recycled water when the lavatory door nudged open. Sully, dressed in his usual black, leaned against the edge of the sink, sipped from the cup in his right hand, and held another for me in his left.
“I told Dorsie they were both for you so she wouldn’t try to poison me.”
“Find Burke’s lab ship, unmask Tage, and she’ll love you again,” I said, tapping off the water and turning on the dryer cycle. I circled slowly, ignoring Sully because nothing could be heard over the noise anyway.
Except this way, he reminded me. Then: Chaz, Del is not the problem you perceive him to be.
Let’s see. He ambushes me on Narfial, blocks you, wanted to neutralize Marsh, and then locks you away from me in some mystical woo-woo place that used to be a shuttle bay. In between all that, he has an annoying habit of calling me “angel” and “lover,” walks a very thin line between harmless flirtation and practiced seduction, and then has the balls to say I’m touchy. I have no idea why I think he’s a problem.
Because the scene is tinged with anger, it's tinged with emotion. And as Swain teaches, it's the author's job to manipulate the emotions of the reader. So it makes sense, then, that dialogue laced with emotions is one of the ways to do that.
When characters are angry, characters--like real people--tend to say things to justify the anger, to bolster their argument. That justification is a sly way of sneaking information in.
So instead of an info dump where Mortimer fumes over the fact that Gladys is late--again--for their lunch date:
Mortimer drummed his fingers on the tabletop, anger rising with each tap. It was twelve-thirty. Gladys should have been here an hour ago. He hated the way she was always late. He wondered if she was playing some kind of control game with him. He'd known her for twelve years--ever since that fateful day in Mrs.
Chelligump's English class at Beachside High School. That's when he first fell in love with her but now that he thought about it, she was late coming to class. So late that he ended up talking to Gertrude instead. Dating Gertrude. And marrying Gertrude. He shuddered...
You can do it in dialogue when Gladys arrives:
The drumming of Mortimer's fingers halted abruptly as Gladys approached.
She smiled as she slid into the empty seat at the table. "Hey, Morty,
I--"
"You're late, Gladys. Late! I've been waiting an hour."
"There was a long line at the grocery store. What did you want, I should leave without paying?" She shrugged. "I'm not a thief like your ex-wife."
Mortimer felt his eyes narrow. Why did she always bring up Gertrude? "Don't start that old argument."
"It's not old! I know you saw her last week and I know you loaned her money again. And yes," she continued, waving one hand to stop whatever was about to come out of his mouth in protest, "I know we're all supposed to be friends now. For the sake of good old Beachside High. But I'm tired of--"
"She helped me out then. I owe her now."
"She wrote your senior year term paper for you, Morty. Twelve years ago. Twelve years! I think you owe her nothing!"
and so on and so forth...
The next time you have backstory or information you need in the novel yet cringe because it feels like an info dump, turn the information into confrontation. Interlace the information with emotions. Have your characters rake up bits and pieces of the past that will, instead of boring the reader, intrigue him.
It's also a handy way of doing a little on-the-fly characterization.
~Linnea
HOPE’S FOLLY, Book 3 in the Gabriel’s Ghost universe, coming Feb. 2009 from RITA award-winning author, Linnea Sinclair, and Bantam Books: http://www.linneasinclair.com/
“Your life is at risk fighting for the Alliance,” he said finally.
“Your life is at risk fighting for the Alliance,” he said finally.
“I’m aware of that, sir.”
“We’re underfunded, understaffed. You’ll be serving—quite possibly fighting—under conditions you’ve never faced before. Being a rebel is not the glamour and glory the vids make it out to be.”
“I’m aware of that too, sir.”
“The danger doesn’t concern you?”
“Danger concerns any good officer. But I’m ImpSec, sir. Special Protection Service.”
“Polite, professional, and prepared to kill?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded slowly. “And if I put you in the same room with the man responsible for the death of your father, and handed you a Carver-Twelve, would you be able to press the trigger?”
Did he really doubt that? “Absolutely, sir.”
He pulled his Carver out of the right side of his shoulder holster and held it up toward her. The grip of a second Carver—another 12, she thought—curved out of the left side.
She took it, not understanding. Did he mean for her to carry his weapon? A small thrill raced through her. Okay, it wasn’t that small. A Carver-12, and his as well. It was still warm from the heat of his body.
“Why haven’t you pressed the trigger?” he asked quietly.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Where Fantasy Meets Science Fiction (Does it ever?)
My brain is a blender.
I've just bought a new Osterizer (TM) to turn nuts and flax/sesame/sunflower/pumpkin seeds into powder, hence the metaphor. The whirling sharp blades are, of course, my incisive analytical skills.
This week, I have several disparate issues on my mind. Also an agenda. I always have an agenda.
1. Goodreads discussions on which GoodReads authors' books are fantasy, which are science fiction, which can be dismissed as merely romance --or alien romance--, and whether the same book(s) can legitimately be nominated reading in both groups.
Obviously, I think so. So do friends and fans of Stacey Klemstein.
2. Crazy Tuesday, February 3rd. Last month, Linnea Sinclair and Catherine Asaro took over the two-hour, Tuesday morning show for me. My guests this coming Tuesday are a truly eclectic mix. Possibly, all we have in common are the fact that each book has a hero (!!) but, we're all thinking of Valentine's Day, and a good book is a much healthier and long-lasting gift than roses or chocolates.
By the way, on Facebook, I posted that Mark Terence Chapman, Kellyann Zuzulo, Emily Bryan, paranormal YA author Lillian Cauldwell, Brenna Lyons, Sara Taney Humphreys and yours truly Rowena Cherry will be talking about Holding Out For a Fantasy Hero.
Lesli Richardson, author of "The Reluctant Dom" suggested a question:
"What do you least like about your heroes, what makes them "human?"
Interesting juxtaposition, that!
Is being "human" the same as being unlikeable?
I can see one of my less-than-likeable aliens, such as Thor-quentin, having some fun with that premise.
3. How marvelous it is that a myth or legend (or half-lost historical truth) can be taken in different directions and become the stuff of different paranormal genres.
The first Djinn romances that I read, after I'd written Forced Mate) were Kathleen Nance's Much More Than Magic and Wishes Come True. Kathleen judged Forced Mate in a contest, and mentioned in a kind note that her plural for Djinns was djinni in her romances.
I wrote back that I preferred to follow Rudyard Kipling.
Kathleen's djinni are hunks with magical powers who shift between dimensions from the magical world of Kaf to the human plane.
Kellyann Zuzulo has just popped up on my radar. Her site www.zubisrises.com has a very cool research page about Djinni.
I've snagged it with Kellyann's permission:
Djinn — The term means "the hidden." And, indeed, these mythological figures have been hidden in human consciousness since ancient, pre-Islamic times, revealing themselves through stories and superstition, but also through fervent belief. While there are countless stories about djinn, most famously those in The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights), existence of the djinn is documented as real and substantial in the Koran, by some Islamic scholars, and in folktales passed from generation to generation.
In the written records of legend and of belief, God created humans from the clay of the earth, angels from celestial light, and the djinn from the smokeless fire. Known variously as jinn, genie, and jnun, the djinn are subject to the same laws of creation as man. And when they sin, they are cursed; considered to be followers of Iblis, a powerful genie who defied God's will and is considered by many to be a manifestation of Satan.
Not all djinn are evil. Like humans, they are born, marry, bear children and interact in the world. The Prophet Mohammed was sent to both djinn and humans, with an entire book of the Koran, the Al-Jinn, devoted to dictates for living and behavior of both species.
As a community, the djinn can be massless, occupying what would seem to be small physical spaces. Yet, they can also expand and assume a physical dimension, travel the world in a flash, or inhabit animals, like cats, dogs,20snakes, and scorpions. For the most part, they are invisible to humans. When they have revealed themselves, djinn are described as being similar to the human form, though more imposing and fearsome. If they choose, they can mingle unnoticed among men. Alternately, some stories and tales have described intercourse between a djinni and a human. There is no prohibition against such co-mingling, although there are not many accounts of it.
Western lore interprets the existence of djinn primarily as Middle Eastern fable. Yet, some aspect of the djinn has been incorporated into European and American tales of fairies and evil spirits. Most cultures describe their own pantheon of spirits that bear startling similarities to the three types of djinn: marid are wicked and malicious spirits, like devils and demons; ifrit are strong and powerful spirits that are not necessarily evil; ghuls are lesser phantoms who can fly, much like ghosts and ghouls.
Supposed remnants of djinn civilizations litter the world’s archaeological digs. From the forgotten city of Ubar in the Rub al Khali, a trackless expanse of desert in southern Arabia, to the mystical and long-abandoned stronghold of Meda'in Saleh in northeastern Saudi Arabia, and its sister city, Petra, in southern Iraq. Across Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt, ruins of ancient sites are still believed by many to harbor realms of the djinn. It is in Ubar that the primordial dwelling place of the djinn purportedly originated — a city once known as Irem of the Pilla rs and which has carried forward in time as the supernatural djinn kingdom of Jinnistan.
Whether djinn truly exist ultimately is a matter of personal belief. Millions of people in the world today are aware of djinn as creatures of myth; of those, easily thousands accept the presence of djinn as real, unseen wards of a parallel realm.
Where you can read more about genies...
NON-FICTION
* Essential Koran: The Heart of Islam, by Thomas Cleary HarperSanFrancisco
* From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race, by Andrew Collins; Bear & Company
* The Jinn In the Qur'an and the Sunna, by Mustafa Ashour; Dar Al Taqwa, Ltd., London, 3rd edition, 1993
* Secrets of Angels, Demons, Satan, and Jinns Decoding their Nature through Koran and Science, by Mahmood Jawaid; InstantPublisher.com, 2006
* The World of the Jinn and Devils, by Dr. Umar Sulaiman al-Ashqar; Al Basheer Company, Boulder, CO 1998
I've just bought a new Osterizer (TM) to turn nuts and flax/sesame/sunflower/pumpkin seeds into powder, hence the metaphor. The whirling sharp blades are, of course, my incisive analytical skills.
This week, I have several disparate issues on my mind. Also an agenda. I always have an agenda.
1. Goodreads discussions on which GoodReads authors' books are fantasy, which are science fiction, which can be dismissed as merely romance --or alien romance--, and whether the same book(s) can legitimately be nominated reading in both groups.
Obviously, I think so. So do friends and fans of Stacey Klemstein.
2. Crazy Tuesday, February 3rd. Last month, Linnea Sinclair and Catherine Asaro took over the two-hour, Tuesday morning show for me. My guests this coming Tuesday are a truly eclectic mix. Possibly, all we have in common are the fact that each book has a hero (!!) but, we're all thinking of Valentine's Day, and a good book is a much healthier and long-lasting gift than roses or chocolates.
By the way, on Facebook, I posted that Mark Terence Chapman, Kellyann Zuzulo, Emily Bryan, paranormal YA author Lillian Cauldwell, Brenna Lyons, Sara Taney Humphreys and yours truly Rowena Cherry will be talking about Holding Out For a Fantasy Hero.
Lesli Richardson, author of "The Reluctant Dom" suggested a question:
"What do you least like about your heroes, what makes them "human?"
Interesting juxtaposition, that!
Is being "human" the same as being unlikeable?
I can see one of my less-than-likeable aliens, such as Thor-quentin, having some fun with that premise.
3. How marvelous it is that a myth or legend (or half-lost historical truth) can be taken in different directions and become the stuff of different paranormal genres.
The first Djinn romances that I read, after I'd written Forced Mate) were Kathleen Nance's Much More Than Magic and Wishes Come True. Kathleen judged Forced Mate in a contest, and mentioned in a kind note that her plural for Djinns was djinni in her romances.
I wrote back that I preferred to follow Rudyard Kipling.
Kathleen's djinni are hunks with magical powers who shift between dimensions from the magical world of Kaf to the human plane.
Kellyann Zuzulo has just popped up on my radar. Her site www.zubisrises.com has a very cool research page about Djinni.
I've snagged it with Kellyann's permission:
Djinn — The term means "the hidden." And, indeed, these mythological figures have been hidden in human consciousness since ancient, pre-Islamic times, revealing themselves through stories and superstition, but also through fervent belief. While there are countless stories about djinn, most famously those in The Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights), existence of the djinn is documented as real and substantial in the Koran, by some Islamic scholars, and in folktales passed from generation to generation.
In the written records of legend and of belief, God created humans from the clay of the earth, angels from celestial light, and the djinn from the smokeless fire. Known variously as jinn, genie, and jnun, the djinn are subject to the same laws of creation as man. And when they sin, they are cursed; considered to be followers of Iblis, a powerful genie who defied God's will and is considered by many to be a manifestation of Satan.
Not all djinn are evil. Like humans, they are born, marry, bear children and interact in the world. The Prophet Mohammed was sent to both djinn and humans, with an entire book of the Koran, the Al-Jinn, devoted to dictates for living and behavior of both species.
As a community, the djinn can be massless, occupying what would seem to be small physical spaces. Yet, they can also expand and assume a physical dimension, travel the world in a flash, or inhabit animals, like cats, dogs,20snakes, and scorpions. For the most part, they are invisible to humans. When they have revealed themselves, djinn are described as being similar to the human form, though more imposing and fearsome. If they choose, they can mingle unnoticed among men. Alternately, some stories and tales have described intercourse between a djinni and a human. There is no prohibition against such co-mingling, although there are not many accounts of it.
Western lore interprets the existence of djinn primarily as Middle Eastern fable. Yet, some aspect of the djinn has been incorporated into European and American tales of fairies and evil spirits. Most cultures describe their own pantheon of spirits that bear startling similarities to the three types of djinn: marid are wicked and malicious spirits, like devils and demons; ifrit are strong and powerful spirits that are not necessarily evil; ghuls are lesser phantoms who can fly, much like ghosts and ghouls.
Supposed remnants of djinn civilizations litter the world’s archaeological digs. From the forgotten city of Ubar in the Rub al Khali, a trackless expanse of desert in southern Arabia, to the mystical and long-abandoned stronghold of Meda'in Saleh in northeastern Saudi Arabia, and its sister city, Petra, in southern Iraq. Across Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt, ruins of ancient sites are still believed by many to harbor realms of the djinn. It is in Ubar that the primordial dwelling place of the djinn purportedly originated — a city once known as Irem of the Pilla rs and which has carried forward in time as the supernatural djinn kingdom of Jinnistan.
Whether djinn truly exist ultimately is a matter of personal belief. Millions of people in the world today are aware of djinn as creatures of myth; of those, easily thousands accept the presence of djinn as real, unseen wards of a parallel realm.
Where you can read more about genies...
NON-FICTION
* Essential Koran: The Heart of Islam, by Thomas Cleary HarperSanFrancisco
* From the Ashes of Angels: The Forbidden Legacy of a Fallen Race, by Andrew Collins; Bear & Company
* The Jinn In the Qur'an and the Sunna, by Mustafa Ashour; Dar Al Taqwa, Ltd., London, 3rd edition, 1993
* Secrets of Angels, Demons, Satan, and Jinns Decoding their Nature through Koran and Science, by Mahmood Jawaid; InstantPublisher.com, 2006
* The World of the Jinn and Devils, by Dr. Umar Sulaiman al-Ashqar; Al Basheer Company, Boulder, CO 1998
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