Part 1 of this series was posted May 26, 2009.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/05/marketing-fiction-in-changing-world.html
Since then, Google invented Google+ which I was sucked into via the hostess of a twitter chat #litchat (which I adore). That connected me on Google+ with a huge number of writers, and that number has grown to thousands now.
On Google+ a post flew by me (and I didn't snag the name of the poster) which pointed to this website:
http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/
This is an online business staffed by people who will, for a fee, edit your manuscript. I don't know them, and I have no idea what exactly they do for how much of a fee, or what the value of that might be. I hope they'll turn up and comment on this post.
I know a number of freelance editors who do good work with copyediting detail, and with finding continuity errors, factual errors, and even pacing and structural errors (getting a climax in the wrong spot in the word-count).
But they don't work for publishing houses. And getting an edit from such a freelance editor doesn't lead to publication.
Last week I introduced you to Azure Boone who had a lot to say about rejection letters:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/03/dreaded-rejection-letter.html
So after that exchange, Azure and I got to talking about how writers 'break into print' -- and what the real role of an editor is. She read my 7 part series on "What Is An Editor" and re-evaluated and sharpened her business model for marketing her fiction.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html -- has links to previous 6 parts.
So when I saw the post about this business offering editing for a fee -- not entirely a new concept at all -- I thought about the things we've discussed here in previous posts on the changing business model for writers.
It's the entire fiction delivery system that's shifting and changing under the impact of three factors:
a) the Supreme Court decision discussed here: (which I've pointed you to previously)
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/thor.htm
b) E-books and mostly the screen technology that makes e-readers like Kindle and Nook - iPhone, iPad, etc - feasible.
c) Accessibility of software that allows individual writers to become publishers, and the hosting of their efforts at websites like smashwords and amazon.com
I keep seeing older people -- often in ophthalmologist's offices and other waiting rooms -- reading Kindle with print set to extra-large, and happily "swiping" to turn the page. This is very significant - especially when you factor in that you can plug in an earphone and LISTEN to the book being read to you, or buy an audiobook with the book performed by an actor.
In fact, two of my own novels, MOLT BROTHER (the sequel, CITY OF A MILLION LEGENDS is being recorded) and HOUSE OF ZEOR, SIME~GEN #1 (the sequel, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER, SIME~GEN #2) is being recorded:
So the world changed -- and is still changing. There's an even bigger impact brewing from internet-delivered TV style video programs, as most young people getting their own apartments are not subscribing to cable at all.
That's a change in the structure of the delivery system that's been visible to many for 10 years at least.
What's new between 2009 and today is the way WRITERS are changing to adapt to this new world's fiction delivery system.
Maybe it's the turning of a generation, but I haven't seen that. I am seeing many writers in their 40's and 50's adapting and changing their business model as fast (sometimes faster) than the world is changing.
And many are just getting into publishing for the first time.
That is remarkable, but because the world has changed so fast, it's possible for someone who is barely 40 to trip over their assumptions about publishing that are obsolete.
There are two separate issues to address: story-craft itself, and marketing.
These two issues intersect on the editor's desk.
At that point, the imaginative ramblings of a fertile mind have to be targeted toward a specific market, a readership, a group with something in common.
All the readers who've gotten a Kindle and madly downloaded "free" books over Christmas or some other holiday promotion have learned that self-publishing has two kinds of writers -- those the reader wants to invest their scarce reading time in, and those the reader does not want to pay for, even at FREE as the price.
And it isn't just spelling, punctuation, grammar, and story-continuity errors that repel potential readers.
All of those corrections go in at the level of the copyediting -- which takes place after EDITING itself.
I just finished editing an anthology titled VAMPIRE'S DILEMMA (doesn't have any story by me in it). So I have this experience fresh in mind.
I recently read a blog on screenwriting about "coverage" -- a screenwriting term for what novel publishers call editing.
The screenwriting blog said what new self-publishing writers who have decided to self-publish because of the "dreaded rejection letters" they have gotten need to know.
"Coverage" you pay for, even from someone who has worked doing "coverage" for a major production company, isn't necessarily worth what you must pay for it.
"Coverage" differs from 'editing' in that it consists mostly of a form that the script-reader fills out, identifying how well certain mechanical parts of the script are done (such as dialogue, climax placement, A story characters face-time, B story, etc). "Coverage" doesn't tell the writer what to do to fix the problems, it simply categorizes the problems. An Editor at a major publishing house will say how to fix the problems to suit the publishing house.
What many beginning writers don't know is that Editors aren't Writing Teachers.
"Coverage" isn't for the writer, either. "Coverage" is designed to inform a producer if this script is within X number of rewrites of the specific property the producer needs to create the film his backers (putting up money in a gamble to make money) expect.
"Coverage" is designed to sift the slush pile for a particular property that fits exacting -- pre-set -- requirements.
So, in effect, there is no such thing as "freelance" coverage. You can pay someone who knows basically what producers they have worked for need, and they can tell you if your script meets such needs -- and finger the points that would have to be rewritten to fit such needs. They can't assess whether your script CONCEPT will sell.
And it's the same with freelance EDITORS. They can copyedit -- and if you find you have a lot of copyediting errors, you should use a copyeditor before you send your manuscript for editing. But the freelance editor can't conform your manuscript to SELL.
The freelance editor works for the writer, not a publisher.
If you can tell the freelance editor that this property is to be submitted to a particular line at a particular publishing house, and that editor has read, studied (or worked for) that line -- they can conform your work to the publisher's requirements.
If you are self-publishing, creating a "line" -- you may be able to give an accomplished and skilled freelance editor a list of your requirements and have them conform your product to your own requirements.
If you know your market and can create a set of requirements, you may find yourself founding a publishing company.
Or, as a freelance writer, you may write, then hire a company like
http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/
to do the editing, possibly another freelance editor to do the copyediting, then pay a techie to conform the manuscript to the requirements at smashwords (pretty simple these days, but still a technical challenge if you're including artwork, charts, graphs, colors, etc), and pay someone to make a cover that will look right at Kindle's thumbnail size, AND pay a publicist who will try to get your product reviewed while you write the next item.
What's happened today, though, is that the sales breakpoint above "free" is 99Cents. People are buying books that have been through professional editors at the big publishing houses, and are "clean" of most errors for a dollar! How will they view your product against that quality assurance item?
Yes, 99cents is the hot-sales price for a reprint. You'll find a lot of such books on
http://backlistebooks.com -- along with some higher priced ones like $2.99 for longer works.
I'm a member of Backlist e-Books, but have no idea who these people at the editing shop are.
How many copies of your novel do you have to sell to make back all those costs before you make a single cent?
How many dollars per your work-hour are you going to make from your book after you've paid all these costs and fees?
Trust me, you'd make more packing grocery bags at the supermarket or collecting grocery carts from the parking lott.
Envision this carefully, then think it all through.
The bottom line is that publishers, agents, editors, etc are worth what you pay them.
But to pay them, to make your business model function at a profit (albeit a thin margin) you must perfect the writing craft to the point where you do not have to do much rewriting.
To achieve that, you must learn to lay out the piece (story, novel, article) in your mind before you begin to create the words. The functional components of the story must lock into place (i.e. follow a trope of some sort, even if it's one you invented) before you start typing words.
When you're finished, you have Microsoft's spellcheck and grammar check to find most of your typos, and then a copyediting run for which you need experienced professional input, maybe two or three of those, with no more work required than to tweak some words.
If you can write 4 books a year -- say 80,000 to 100,000 words apiece -- and make them all appeal to the same readership who will keep coming back for more, after 5 years of sustained effort, you might gross $30,000/year in a good year.
But this world isn't up to supporting that yet.
We are generating the freelance self-publishing writers, and the mechanism for distributing books via smashwords, amazon.com, createspace.com etc. We're getting the companies that provide just editing (such as the one I'm featuring here which could be gone tomorrow, or be successful and get bought up).
And we're getting the freelance cover art creators, such as Penny Ash, who did the cover for VAMPIRE'S DILEMMA.
We've had freelance publicists working by email for a while -- but as a professional reviewer, I have to say that there are very few of them that I accept books from because of discovering discrepancies between the "pitch" for the book and the book itself.
We have a growing industry of freelance bloggers who do reviews, and many readerships have flocked to them for help in sorting the avalanche of novels pouring out of the e-publishing business.
What are we missing to make this re-construction of the publishing industry around a new business model actually work?
We're missing the agents.
A writer needs to be able to put her head into her stories and just write -- to produce those 4 books a year (which is a common workload for working writers). To focus like that, the writer needs an agent to manage this entire circus of other skilled professionals that waft the writer's product to the reader.
And the other thing that exists but isn't yet notched into place in the mechanism in text storytelling is the professional level writing school, or writing teacher.
From the website, I do not see how http://www.21streeturbanediting.com/ distinguishes itself from a writing school.
In my experience, beginning writers think they need an editor's attention when in fact they need a writing teacher.
That's where the bewilderment over the "The Dreaded Rejection Letter" we talked about last week comes from. The beginner in this industry expects the editor to say what's wrong with the manuscript, not just reject it.
The screenwriting industry seems to have generated a school that is successfully doing this polish coat on the craft of screenwriters. In fact, I know of three such --
http://www.screenwritingu.com/rewrite_conference4.html
And the Supermentors round table project of
http://www.zicree.com/
And blakesnyder.com and the SAVE THE CAT! seminars and books.
These are the serious, and very expensive, entrees to screenwriting (there are others of this type using similar business models).
In screenwriting, though, because there are more ambitious people trying to get into what amounts to a necessarily limited number of working slots, there are a number of very predatory organizations that purport to teach screenwriting or to provide entree to the industry, but who use a business model based on fleecing the innocent by soothing their egos rather than whipping them into shape.
On another front, we have YouTube growing us a generation of skilled videographers and storytellers exhibiting worldclass skills. Watch the top-hit producers on YouTube and study what you're looking at. THERE is the generation of a new industry.
But all these writers create more than any one person could read in a lifetime.
The next functional component of this business model has to be a replacement for what many call "the gatekeepers" -- the people who decide what will be bought, what will be invested in with the expectation of making a profit, and what will not be invested in.
These "gatekeepers" are the folks who the reader, the person who lays down their money and invests their time, depends on to narrow the choices, and spot the one item that the reader actually wants to spend their evening with.
There is, perhaps, a misconception on the part of the marketers when it comes to marketing fiction.
If you look at the shifts in the TV cable industry, and how internet delivered TV and video are chopping up the TV market, you will see it.
There are those who market a delivery service (such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, Apple TV) by boasting "we have X hundred thousand films and TV episodes."
They are marketing to people who have free time to kill and just want a distraction.
But most of the readers I know don't read just to fill up time that's heavy on their hands.
People go after a particular product to read because of the payload they expect that specific thing to deliver.
People imbibe fiction for a personal reward -- not to waste away time.
The pace of life has picked up today to the point where people don't have time to read, or watch TV regularly. We're just too busy and too frantic. Movies are too expensive (Christmas weekend boxoffice was off this year).
So we see advertisements on TV for the big expensive movies (like WARHORSE), and we go "I want to see that."
What we see advertised, what comes to us, we "want" and go after.
But what about all the rest of the stuff that we might actually like better -- but don't know exists?
Google is working on tailoring the advertising that appears beside the website you're on or beside your gmail mailbox to have some relevance to what else has captured your interest. They haven't nailed it yet, but they're making progress.
This political season may see more progress. I've noticed how political polls have gotten better at predicting winners -- or at least losers.
What we're seeing with advertising and polling is a technical application that may allow self-publishing or small-publishers to target readerships accurately enough to make a real living with the fiction delivery system.
Yes, I know political ads are odious in the extreme, but hold your nose and study them.
They are "romancing" the voter! It's very aggressive stuff. But if you penetrate that surface, you will find the "gatekeeper" model behind it all -- the very thing that new writers get so resentful of.
There is a mathematics behind all this, predicting the behavior of large numbers of people. It's called Public Relations now, but that's a euphemism. The mathematics is based on games theory. (Google "The Overton Window").
There are two sides to this. A) doing what large numbers of people want from you B) making large numbers of people do what you want from them.
Sound familiar? Change "large numbers" to "one person" and you could write that sex scene from a pickup in a bar to the morning after.
That's the marketing business, and it's product independent. It doesn't matter if it's a novel or a politician, marketing works the same.
And they use social networking now -- a tool that's accessible to writers (if only they had time).
What the mathematicians doing "game theory" and the tech companies like Google are trying to figure out is how to be an agent.
Google apparently wants to be the Agent between product producers (such as writers) and product marketers -- such as the fiction delivery system components I've been discussing here.
But there are some missing pieces to this puzzle of Marketing fiction in a changing world.
Two things I see missing (that may turn up in 2012 or 2013) are:
A) Ultra-cheap ways of "routing" (or agenting) the right story to the right reader
B) Ultra-accurate ways of determining what will give you want you want or need so it can be routed to you.
Right now the fiction delivery system is in chaos and thrashing around delivering product at random, trying this, trying that.
The high-budget risk takers are sticking to the old tried-and-true "remakes" and sequels to films that have been hits. I've already heard folks on twitter complaining about that lack of originality.
Watch YouTube -- there is a new arbiter of taste emerging from the applications of "hit counters" and that Google +1 button -- by counting the responses of people at random, "they" are going to try to replicate what the author's agent has traditionally done.
If you want an image of that task in your mind -- think of what your household "router" does for your computer connection to the internet -- putting several householding devices onto the internet from your single account.
If you don't know how that works, you should learn because I suspect it will be the dominent piece of the puzzle for the next "build" of the fiction delivery system.
Google is not fooling around here. It's making money from a) predicting behavior and b) creating behavior -- and interacting these two processes to "correct" behavior. (check out Google Chrome and its battle against Windows Explorer)
The highest level tech applications and the smartest people are participating in this remake of the world.
Every move Google makes changes the Writer's Business Model, and how you market your fiction depends on how "they" change the world.
If you think that publishing's "gatekeepers" have been an onerous burden, you need to think about the drummers hammering out the beat that the "gatekeepers" dance to.
Figure out what dance (fictional tropes are just like dances) comes next on the playlist, and get the right shoes (editor) for that dance.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Thursday, March 15, 2012
EPICCon 2012
EPIC (the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition) is holding its annual EPICCon in San Antonio this week. My erotic, Lovecraft-inspired paranormal romance "Song from the Abyss" is a finalist in the Novella category of the annual e-book competition. Here's the list of finalists:
http://www.epicorg.org/competitions/2012-awards-finalists.html
This is the first year novellas have had their own category instead of competing with novels in their respective genres (a change about which I have reservations, because it seems to me that novellas have more in common with novels in the same genre than with dissimilar works of their same length, but we'll have to wait and see how it turns out). Since I couldn't make it to the conference this year, I'll be eagerly watching the EPIC lists this weekend to find out how "Song from the Abyss" stacks up.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
http://www.epicorg.org/competitions/2012-awards-finalists.html
This is the first year novellas have had their own category instead of competing with novels in their respective genres (a change about which I have reservations, because it seems to me that novellas have more in common with novels in the same genre than with dissimilar works of their same length, but we'll have to wait and see how it turns out). Since I couldn't make it to the conference this year, I'll be eagerly watching the EPIC lists this weekend to find out how "Song from the Abyss" stacks up.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
The Dreaded Rejection Letter
This may turn out to be Part 1 of a series.
Among my "circles" on Google+ I met a Paranormal Romance Writer (what a co-incidence!). Her name is Azure Boone, and I haven't read any of her romance stories yet, but her Google+ profile says (irresistibly) "Writer of paranormal romance involving demons and angels."
So I saw her note about a blog post she'd written:
http://motherfugnwriters.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/190/
That's a Wordpress blog so you don't see the title in the link. It's "Rejection is not my color." It's a suggestion that editors use a color code with rejection letters, pointing to a set of "reasons for rejection" posted online, so the rejected writer can know why their manuscript wasn't suitable. I have way too much to say about that, but I've said most of it previously on this blog.
I let the post pass by me, then went back and dropped a comment, and pointed Azure to another item I'd just dropped on Google+.
It went like this:
I posted about Talentville.com
---------- QUOTE--------
Now this is an intriguing concept, but it's expensive to join in.
-----------END QUOTE------
Talentville.com is a new online screenwriting community connecting aspiring writers with Hollywood Insiders, created by Final Draft co-founder and creator Ben Cahan. It charges an annual fee, and is for very serious screenwriters investing in their education.
I found Talentville.com mentioned on a Facebook Group of screenwriters I belong to, and Final Draft is my software-of-choice for screenwriting.
Then I saw Azure Boone's post about rejection -- and "click" went my mind.
So I posted to Azure using her "handle" so she'd see it, on the Talent.com post, and flagged a Screenwriter ( +Randall Oelerich )who had just noted how much fun Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had starting out at the beginning of the PC revolution.
------------ Here's what I said ---------
+azure boone Saw your note on rejection letters. I've gotten my share, and my share of acceptance letters, and my share of queries. Professionals ahead of me on the career track always said don't listen to others who are at your level of development as a writer. "If you listen to the dogs barking, you'll go deaf before you learn anything." -- But I found that adage to be dwindling into the middens of history.
With fan-fiction writing and now with organizations like Taletnville.com (there are a number of these things around), peer-review is beginning to be the training ground. Screenwriters are getting "audience-review" on YouTube when they hook up with short-film makers. Some enterprising folks are monetizing these efforts, so participants have to think "business model" when deciding to join.
We are creating an entirely new world. As +Randall Oelerich noted about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they had fun in "the early days." THESE are our early days. We have to learn to use language accurately, and not call it "rejection" when an outlet takes a pass on a project.
----------------
Azure responded very quickly with this:
--------Azure---------
Hello, and thanks for the wisdom. I was thinking that no rejection letters come with the word rejection written anywhere on it, but a writer doesn't need it to, a rejection is a rejection, or a pass, is a pass.
The issue I addressed isn't about the word or term as we have come to understand the process of "rejection" but the manner in which the pass/rejection is made. I think the publishing industry would further the entire cause for writers and publishers if they worked together on meeting needs, not at a feel good word level, but at a functional level. The solution I presented in my blog was literally a solution, even though I made it fun.
Did I misunderstand you?
--------------
Well, no, she didn't misunderstand me, but even though it was only a few minutes later, I'd already thought a thousand thoughts. Well, you know me, I think and my fingers fly over the keyboard, and before I knew it, I had a whole blog post in my answer to her. Here's what I answered.
-----------
+Azure Boone Before I drop the link I have for you, I need to say this. Yes, I do in fact love your basic thinking behind suggesting quick-color-code answers -- and yes, I got it that the suggestions were laced with humor. This is the kind of thinking that we need to keep doing, not just stop right there where you ended off. Your post should be a springboard into this knotty topic.
And it is knotty, because it's a whole "point of view" thing, and it is the BIG point of view/business-model thing that new writers (in text and image industries both) come acropper on over and over. There's "art" and there's "craft" and there's "social networking" and there's "audience building" and there's far-out nebulous philosophy stuff of which thematic statements are made. AND THEN THERE'S BUSINESS.
But ultimately, delivering the artist's view on a theme to a consumer who's in the mood to be enchanted by participating in a game of ideas, is a business. At least in this world we currently live in, it is a business. Note how quickly media promotion folks grabbed onto social networking, and are busy twisting "social" into a tool to warp behavior.
When you present your art-product to an "editor" (producer, first reader, whatever), when you take your product to market you are crossing the line from creation of a product to the marketing of that product. You are not talking to a "partner" but to an "exploiter" whose living depends on taking your product and putting it on a store shelf.
Think about those drum-pounding people who try to sucker "inventors" into patenting something through their business. Or think about that "seen on TV" website where these handy inventions are marketed - think about the catalogs that market gadgets.
That's the realm you venture into when you first send your manuscript out the door.
And right outside your door, the path to your audience takes a right-angle bend!
You and the editor are actually working at cross purposes.
If you ever studied vector analysis, you know that I'm describing the straight line that goes up the graph at a 45 degree angle -- that's the path that leads to the audience, or market.
The editor is looking for a product that can be shoved along that 45degree angle path directly to the market that editor has been hired to reach.
It is not the editor's JOB to educate writers in the business. Nor is it the Agent's job to teach writing.
(truth is, that's become my job these days!)
If the editor spends even one second trying to determine how to explain (to a total stranger who might be an amateur writer with their heart on their sleeve) what exactly disqualifies this manuscript from this publication line, that will probably mean the editor will get fired for not performing the job they were hired to do.
That job is to provide a steady stream of product for a conveyor belt that CAN NOT BE STOPPED OR PAUSED -- it is a relentless, timed, mechanism that only makes a profit if it moves at that steady pace.
Editors rarely last long in any job. And long-working editors are getting rarer and rarer. They run panic-stricken most of the time, when the sales numbers come back. Sales tracking is a whole new world too!
Editors can't stop to tell you why your product doesn't fit their requirements.
Mostly they don't know, and don't have the time to care, nevermind figure out how to explain it.
Their job isn't explaining. Their job is picking, and picking correctly. Then picking again, and again. FAST.
But they can (and do) tell you what they need. And your color-code system has potential to streamline the editor's direct call for a particular product. Only they won't call to writers. They will call to Agents.
Used to be that was done over the Power Lunch (I've been at many such Manhattan lunches). Agents and editors hang out, make friends, and the agent scopes out the editor's "buttons" -- what they really like, and what they are madly searching for. Then the agent lets certain writers in their stable know what there's a market for -- the agent chooses those writers by what the writer has already produced along that line. (I've been on all sides of this process.) The Agent's profit margin depends on generating the right product for the right editor.
The reason it works this way is simply, "TIME IS MONEY." Nobody has any time to waste, training writers to write. This is even more true in the screenwriting biz.
Agents have the same biz model. Time is money. They must supply product to the editors in a form the editor can use to fill their conveyor belt. The product must FIT that pre-built conveyor belt. It's a pipeline from the publisher to the reader who will pay for that product. The pipeline is built by business, and it's as fixed and solid as an oil pipeline. Like an oil pipeline traversing thousands of miles, it carries product that's hot and under pressure, and must arrive at the destination exactly, thusly, so!
The pipeline costs a lot to build and maintain, so it must deliver enough product to make back that cost plus the salaries of everyone who shoves product into that pipeline -- and these days, it must also make a profit for the shareholders of big corporations that own publishers (or film companies).
The commercial art delivery system is a relentless business model. If the pressure ever slackens, the razor-thin margins collapse bringing the company down with it.
If you find that you, as a writer, can't or don't want to produce for pre-built pipelines, then maybe you don't want to write commercial fiction. Today there's a market for "handmade" (no two alike) novels.
Manhattan, the Big Six, and Hollywood are mass producers. That's why it's called "Mass Market Paperback" -- because it's a product designed to be mass produced, like the Model T Ford and all its successors. Thousands of identical items produced and moving through that delivery system fulfill the voracious needs of a "mass" market -- i.e. lowest common denominator taste. Many novels, different authors and titles, the same words arranged differently, identical product that gets assembled along the conveyor belt and then fits the pipeline. Model T's were all black. Today we get cars in different colors, but the production principle is the same. Mass produced cars; mass produced entertainment.
Maybe you, as a writer, would prefer the "Tailor Made" or "Hand Made" business model, of original art pieces, no two alike, no duplications -- paintings such as you see in an upper class Art Gallery, not prints you find in Target.
It's something to think about before you launch a career. You can do both. That's what Pen Names are for!
You might want to read my blog post on whether you should create a pen name.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
So now I've accidentally written a whole blog post, I'll insert the link to my 7-part series on EDITING, which is aimed at trying to give writers insight into the editor's point of view, so the writer can make a smoother approach and carry on the business of selling art to the commercial market.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
That link leads to Part 7, which has links to the previous parts at the top of the post. (yes, I write humongous-long-insanely-abstract blog posts).
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Among my "circles" on Google+ I met a Paranormal Romance Writer (what a co-incidence!). Her name is Azure Boone, and I haven't read any of her romance stories yet, but her Google+ profile says (irresistibly) "Writer of paranormal romance involving demons and angels."
So I saw her note about a blog post she'd written:
http://motherfugnwriters.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/190/
That's a Wordpress blog so you don't see the title in the link. It's "Rejection is not my color." It's a suggestion that editors use a color code with rejection letters, pointing to a set of "reasons for rejection" posted online, so the rejected writer can know why their manuscript wasn't suitable. I have way too much to say about that, but I've said most of it previously on this blog.
I let the post pass by me, then went back and dropped a comment, and pointed Azure to another item I'd just dropped on Google+.
It went like this:
I posted about Talentville.com
---------- QUOTE--------
Now this is an intriguing concept, but it's expensive to join in.
-----------END QUOTE------
Talentville.com is a new online screenwriting community connecting aspiring writers with Hollywood Insiders, created by Final Draft co-founder and creator Ben Cahan. It charges an annual fee, and is for very serious screenwriters investing in their education.
I found Talentville.com mentioned on a Facebook Group of screenwriters I belong to, and Final Draft is my software-of-choice for screenwriting.
Then I saw Azure Boone's post about rejection -- and "click" went my mind.
So I posted to Azure using her "handle" so she'd see it, on the Talent.com post, and flagged a Screenwriter ( +Randall Oelerich )who had just noted how much fun Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had starting out at the beginning of the PC revolution.
------------ Here's what I said ---------
+azure boone Saw your note on rejection letters. I've gotten my share, and my share of acceptance letters, and my share of queries. Professionals ahead of me on the career track always said don't listen to others who are at your level of development as a writer. "If you listen to the dogs barking, you'll go deaf before you learn anything." -- But I found that adage to be dwindling into the middens of history.
With fan-fiction writing and now with organizations like Taletnville.com (there are a number of these things around), peer-review is beginning to be the training ground. Screenwriters are getting "audience-review" on YouTube when they hook up with short-film makers. Some enterprising folks are monetizing these efforts, so participants have to think "business model" when deciding to join.
We are creating an entirely new world. As +Randall Oelerich noted about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they had fun in "the early days." THESE are our early days. We have to learn to use language accurately, and not call it "rejection" when an outlet takes a pass on a project.
----------------
Azure responded very quickly with this:
--------Azure---------
Hello, and thanks for the wisdom. I was thinking that no rejection letters come with the word rejection written anywhere on it, but a writer doesn't need it to, a rejection is a rejection, or a pass, is a pass.
The issue I addressed isn't about the word or term as we have come to understand the process of "rejection" but the manner in which the pass/rejection is made. I think the publishing industry would further the entire cause for writers and publishers if they worked together on meeting needs, not at a feel good word level, but at a functional level. The solution I presented in my blog was literally a solution, even though I made it fun.
Did I misunderstand you?
--------------
Well, no, she didn't misunderstand me, but even though it was only a few minutes later, I'd already thought a thousand thoughts. Well, you know me, I think and my fingers fly over the keyboard, and before I knew it, I had a whole blog post in my answer to her. Here's what I answered.
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+Azure Boone Before I drop the link I have for you, I need to say this. Yes, I do in fact love your basic thinking behind suggesting quick-color-code answers -- and yes, I got it that the suggestions were laced with humor. This is the kind of thinking that we need to keep doing, not just stop right there where you ended off. Your post should be a springboard into this knotty topic.
And it is knotty, because it's a whole "point of view" thing, and it is the BIG point of view/business-model thing that new writers (in text and image industries both) come acropper on over and over. There's "art" and there's "craft" and there's "social networking" and there's "audience building" and there's far-out nebulous philosophy stuff of which thematic statements are made. AND THEN THERE'S BUSINESS.
But ultimately, delivering the artist's view on a theme to a consumer who's in the mood to be enchanted by participating in a game of ideas, is a business. At least in this world we currently live in, it is a business. Note how quickly media promotion folks grabbed onto social networking, and are busy twisting "social" into a tool to warp behavior.
When you present your art-product to an "editor" (producer, first reader, whatever), when you take your product to market you are crossing the line from creation of a product to the marketing of that product. You are not talking to a "partner" but to an "exploiter" whose living depends on taking your product and putting it on a store shelf.
Think about those drum-pounding people who try to sucker "inventors" into patenting something through their business. Or think about that "seen on TV" website where these handy inventions are marketed - think about the catalogs that market gadgets.
That's the realm you venture into when you first send your manuscript out the door.
And right outside your door, the path to your audience takes a right-angle bend!
You and the editor are actually working at cross purposes.
If you ever studied vector analysis, you know that I'm describing the straight line that goes up the graph at a 45 degree angle -- that's the path that leads to the audience, or market.
The editor is looking for a product that can be shoved along that 45degree angle path directly to the market that editor has been hired to reach.
It is not the editor's JOB to educate writers in the business. Nor is it the Agent's job to teach writing.
(truth is, that's become my job these days!)
If the editor spends even one second trying to determine how to explain (to a total stranger who might be an amateur writer with their heart on their sleeve) what exactly disqualifies this manuscript from this publication line, that will probably mean the editor will get fired for not performing the job they were hired to do.
That job is to provide a steady stream of product for a conveyor belt that CAN NOT BE STOPPED OR PAUSED -- it is a relentless, timed, mechanism that only makes a profit if it moves at that steady pace.
Editors rarely last long in any job. And long-working editors are getting rarer and rarer. They run panic-stricken most of the time, when the sales numbers come back. Sales tracking is a whole new world too!
Editors can't stop to tell you why your product doesn't fit their requirements.
Mostly they don't know, and don't have the time to care, nevermind figure out how to explain it.
Their job isn't explaining. Their job is picking, and picking correctly. Then picking again, and again. FAST.
But they can (and do) tell you what they need. And your color-code system has potential to streamline the editor's direct call for a particular product. Only they won't call to writers. They will call to Agents.
Used to be that was done over the Power Lunch (I've been at many such Manhattan lunches). Agents and editors hang out, make friends, and the agent scopes out the editor's "buttons" -- what they really like, and what they are madly searching for. Then the agent lets certain writers in their stable know what there's a market for -- the agent chooses those writers by what the writer has already produced along that line. (I've been on all sides of this process.) The Agent's profit margin depends on generating the right product for the right editor.
The reason it works this way is simply, "TIME IS MONEY." Nobody has any time to waste, training writers to write. This is even more true in the screenwriting biz.
Agents have the same biz model. Time is money. They must supply product to the editors in a form the editor can use to fill their conveyor belt. The product must FIT that pre-built conveyor belt. It's a pipeline from the publisher to the reader who will pay for that product. The pipeline is built by business, and it's as fixed and solid as an oil pipeline. Like an oil pipeline traversing thousands of miles, it carries product that's hot and under pressure, and must arrive at the destination exactly, thusly, so!
The pipeline costs a lot to build and maintain, so it must deliver enough product to make back that cost plus the salaries of everyone who shoves product into that pipeline -- and these days, it must also make a profit for the shareholders of big corporations that own publishers (or film companies).
The commercial art delivery system is a relentless business model. If the pressure ever slackens, the razor-thin margins collapse bringing the company down with it.
If you find that you, as a writer, can't or don't want to produce for pre-built pipelines, then maybe you don't want to write commercial fiction. Today there's a market for "handmade" (no two alike) novels.
Manhattan, the Big Six, and Hollywood are mass producers. That's why it's called "Mass Market Paperback" -- because it's a product designed to be mass produced, like the Model T Ford and all its successors. Thousands of identical items produced and moving through that delivery system fulfill the voracious needs of a "mass" market -- i.e. lowest common denominator taste. Many novels, different authors and titles, the same words arranged differently, identical product that gets assembled along the conveyor belt and then fits the pipeline. Model T's were all black. Today we get cars in different colors, but the production principle is the same. Mass produced cars; mass produced entertainment.
Maybe you, as a writer, would prefer the "Tailor Made" or "Hand Made" business model, of original art pieces, no two alike, no duplications -- paintings such as you see in an upper class Art Gallery, not prints you find in Target.
It's something to think about before you launch a career. You can do both. That's what Pen Names are for!
You might want to read my blog post on whether you should create a pen name.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-i.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/should-you-make-up-pen-name-part-ii.html
So now I've accidentally written a whole blog post, I'll insert the link to my 7-part series on EDITING, which is aimed at trying to give writers insight into the editor's point of view, so the writer can make a smoother approach and carry on the business of selling art to the commercial market.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
That link leads to Part 7, which has links to the previous parts at the top of the post. (yes, I write humongous-long-insanely-abstract blog posts).
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Thursday, March 08, 2012
The Wolf Gift
Anne Rice has just released her first werewolf novel, THE WOLF GIFT. The protagonist, Reuben, at first looks like a typical movie werewolf. In fact, the text makes explicit comparisons to the Lon Chaney film. Reuben gets transformed by a bite, and he looks like a bipedal beast man, not a wolf. He thinks of himself as the Man Wolf, which is what the media call him. The first transformations come over him involuntarily; he gradually develops some control. Since the author is Anne Rice, naturally the apparent movie-pastiche simplicity of the premise soon grows more complicated.
Reuben is a difficult character for me to identify with. Although working as a reporter in San Francisco, he’s so independently rich (family money) that he can consider buying a five-million-dollar mansion on a whim. He’s repeatedly described as “beautiful,” of which he’s fully aware (though, to be fair, not conceited about his attractiveness). He cheats on his fiancee, twice, with women he has just met—though the narrative does make the second lapse understandable, since he’s in beast form at the time. Nevertheless, the plot premise and the metaphysical and spiritual threads woven into the story kept me interested in Reuben’s plight.
Whether the word “gift” is meant ironically remains in question for most of the book. Would you think of the power to become a beast—if you could control it somewhat—as a gift or a curse? In the terms of Rice’s story, the transformation has many pluses: Reuben heals supernaturally fast. He has preternatural sensory perception. He’s super-strong. Even in human form, he keeps his enhanced senses. His kind, the “Morphenkind,” can be killed only by decapitation or equally drastic means. Eventually he discovers he has acquired a lifespan of centuries (an odd detail that makes a werewolf almost equivalent to a vampire with flesh-craving instead of blood-craving, but lots of contemporary fictional lycanthropes seem to share that trait of near-immortality).
On the minus side, resisting the change remains hard. Still harder is fighting the Morphengift’s compulsion to destroy evil. Reuben’s change includes the ability to sense, almost to smell, people’s evil intentions. When a person about to commit a vile deed comes within Reuben’s range, the beast is irresistibly compelled to slay and devour the evildoer. By saving victims of muggers and rapists, he becomes famed as a mysterious superhero. On the other hand, of course, he is wanted by the law and in danger of being either jailed, killed, or locked in a research lab.
So—gift or curse? Would you want this power? If not, under what conditions, if any, would you want the “gift” of animal transformation?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind being able to turn into a cat. An occasional interlude of having to do nothing but eat, sleep, and get petted sounds good to me.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Reuben is a difficult character for me to identify with. Although working as a reporter in San Francisco, he’s so independently rich (family money) that he can consider buying a five-million-dollar mansion on a whim. He’s repeatedly described as “beautiful,” of which he’s fully aware (though, to be fair, not conceited about his attractiveness). He cheats on his fiancee, twice, with women he has just met—though the narrative does make the second lapse understandable, since he’s in beast form at the time. Nevertheless, the plot premise and the metaphysical and spiritual threads woven into the story kept me interested in Reuben’s plight.
Whether the word “gift” is meant ironically remains in question for most of the book. Would you think of the power to become a beast—if you could control it somewhat—as a gift or a curse? In the terms of Rice’s story, the transformation has many pluses: Reuben heals supernaturally fast. He has preternatural sensory perception. He’s super-strong. Even in human form, he keeps his enhanced senses. His kind, the “Morphenkind,” can be killed only by decapitation or equally drastic means. Eventually he discovers he has acquired a lifespan of centuries (an odd detail that makes a werewolf almost equivalent to a vampire with flesh-craving instead of blood-craving, but lots of contemporary fictional lycanthropes seem to share that trait of near-immortality).
On the minus side, resisting the change remains hard. Still harder is fighting the Morphengift’s compulsion to destroy evil. Reuben’s change includes the ability to sense, almost to smell, people’s evil intentions. When a person about to commit a vile deed comes within Reuben’s range, the beast is irresistibly compelled to slay and devour the evildoer. By saving victims of muggers and rapists, he becomes famed as a mysterious superhero. On the other hand, of course, he is wanted by the law and in danger of being either jailed, killed, or locked in a research lab.
So—gift or curse? Would you want this power? If not, under what conditions, if any, would you want the “gift” of animal transformation?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind being able to turn into a cat. An occasional interlude of having to do nothing but eat, sleep, and get petted sounds good to me.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Soul Mate Characters: Heroic, Villainous, Mystical And Romantic
Before we get started on this huge, deep topic, let me just note I've put up an experimental blog listing the characters (one character per "post") in my most recent Sime~Gen Novel, The Farris Channel, Sime~Gen #12, with a quick reference about "who" they are in the story. It's a blog so that people who are reading the (very large, character-rich) novel have a place to note things about the characters for themselves, and for potential fanfic writers who might want to explore the complex, offstage lives of the ancillary characters (as other Sime~Gen characters have been explored in fanfic).
The blog is:
http://charactersinsimegen.blogspot.com/
Sometime next week (March 12-16, 2012) the audiobook of the first novel in Sime~Gen, House of Zeor, is slated to be released as audiobook from audible.com (on Amazon and iTunes etc) and so far the fans who have heard samples of Michael Spence's reading are absolutely thrilled with his rendition of the main characters in that novel, Heroic, Villainous and Mystical alike.
While I've been working on the audiobook project (Molt Brother is out, City of a Million Legends is being recorded, and Michael is getting ready to start Unto Zeor, Forever), and thinking about characters and actor's renditions of characters, on Google+ I found the following link to a newspaper article being shared that made a big impression on me:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/health/2011/12/violent_video_games_may_affect.html
It's about brain research chasing a link between violent video games and the behavior of children who grow up playing them. It doesn't site conclusive evidence, but it's "hot pursuit" time in this area.
We all know the link between sexuality and violence, and how "dark" sex-based fiction can get especially when the Romance is left completely in the dust by mechanical sex scenes.
I'm all for really good sex scenes, mind you, but they have to be essential to the theme, make a clear statement, and advance the plot swiftly while deepening the flow of story. Good sex scenes are harder to write than good combat and violence scenes. Good sex is a form of communication, a language of love. Substituting anatomy for announcements is weak writing.
MY OPINION ON THAT ARTICLE: It's not "sports" or "videogames" that cause "violence" -- it's the enactment of the "zero sum game" model of reality.
A sex scene that's a "zero-sum-game" will be an announcement of aggression that will be an act of dominance and maybe violence. Do you only love and treasure what you dominate? ("Dominate" means to be able to "take away" (I have/ you don't zero-sum-game model) anything from possessions to self-esteem from another human being.)
"Sportsmanship" used to include celebration that the other guy won, not you, and you didn't have less of anything because the other guy scored more points: not less prestige, strutting rights, joy, or anything. It wasn't a zero sum game even with rules and scores.
"It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game that counts." (Honor, integrity, fairness). As society has evolved over the last few decades, we can see in our films and novels how that concept of sportsmanship became ironic, then ridiculous, and now isn't even said.
Sports is about honor and heroism, about helping the fallen get up and go at it again, about breaking through your own inner, personal barriers and becoming a better person (and not on drugs) -- not better than some other person you "beat" but better than you, yourself were. Sports is about excellence (as is Sime~Gen's House of Zeor) - it's about excelling your own personal-best, not about excelling someone else's personal best.
It's not "sports" that's the problem in our current society; it's sanctioned viciousness. Sports used to be an exercise in character development. Now it's more like politics, an exercise in character debasement. What you practice, you get better at.
But that's the world we live in, isn't it? The world of raising children by debasing their characters to where they only know how to "win" by debasing the character of others.
How many mothers out there ever even notice their kids staring at political ads? How much do the kids understand? What do they model from that? How does that affect what they look for in a Soul Mate -- someone they can easily debase, or someone they will allow to debase them?
MY OPINION: No, no, no!
This world is made out of love for love, and because of love. That's not my opinion. It's my perception. It's what I see when I look out of my eyes and assemble all the little pixel-dots and the black space around them (an image I used in a previous discussion here of a trilogy of historical romance novels set around 1050 C. E.)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html
Character is one of the "filters" you use to "select" what is signal and what is noise in your life around you. Your character is what selects what lights up the pixels that form your image of your life, and what you suppress or ignore. These bits of information form a picture of the world around you that you can work with and within.
It's your character, and the assessment of the character of others that creates that picture of the world, your life, and your potential.
Ask most readers of Romance stories and you'll find that' it's character they respond to most. If they can't relate to the main character, they just won't finish the book. Romance books need "strong" characters -- characters with character.
You know, USA NETWORK's "characters welcome!"
One of the things writers use to add "color" to characters is the techniques used to "reveal" their character strengths, weaknesses, and the identifying, individual quirks.
When you weave all those character traits together, strength, weakness, quirks, you get a "strong" character, a character who doesn't change behavior or values in an emergency -- a character that's been built from childhood in a non-zero-sum-game world. That's a character who has the "strength" to "give" himself - to sacrifice for the good of others.
The "strong" character will create a good cause, not just find one. The "strong" character is the one who loses a child to a drunk-driver accident, and founds Alcoholics Anonymous or Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
The "weak" character is the one who loudly and publicly proclaims his "values" and "moral compass" and "leadership" and then, in any little emergency (unexpected event) throws all those values away in order to respond to the emergency.
Consider the classic "lifeboat" situation where say, 6 skinny people are huddled on a lifeboat tossed by high seas and a 7th very fat person is sinking the boat. It's an emergency, so the 6 skinny people are therefore morally required to throw away the "Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder" commandment and toss the fat person overboard for the good of the majority.
Those are 6 people of very weak character.
If they were of strong character and normally held that murder was not something they would ever participate in, they would never consider tossing anyone overboard merely for their own survival.
Those of strong character who believe that murder is wrong would never even consider murder in large groups like a mob. The force of "mob psychology" and destructive frenzy explosively released in resentment simply leaves such a "strong character" cold. A strong character standing in the midst of a mob that bursts into frenzy will simply edge to the rear and drift off down a side street. She may then circle back, get help, and confront the mob's head end and try to stop the destruction. But not with violence.
We're not talking "army" here; the army does not murder, but can and does "kill" for the good of the group, which is completely sanctioned by the 10 Commandments. Translations usually say "kill" but the actual text says "murder." That's killing for personal gain, not self defense. Soldiers don't set out to kill people, just to "neutralize" them -- make them stop destroying the soldier's own family and nation.
That "Kill"/"Murder" distinction is one I use in the Sime~Gen novels because I thought about it very carefully and studied and learned.
Now why is it relevant to a writer creating a Romance story? I mean most Romance doesn't involve killing or murder (though I do love a good detective novel with a hot romance driving the plot.)
It's relevant because "Values" has everything to do with "character strength" which is the lynchpin in the whole Soul Mate concept.
Character is the connecting link because it is the one thing that you can "take with you" beyond this life. What character strength you develop in this life will be there for you to retrieve (by repeating some experiences, sometimes vicariously by just reading a Romance story) once you reincarnate. That's the theory anyway, and it turns up in so many theories of karma and reincarnation that I suspect it's real. It certainly resonates with a majority of readers and forms the foundation of most fiction that doesn't even deal with the supernatural.
I use the idea of murder to measure character strength just as an illustration of the principle of what makes a "strong" character in the eyes of an editor.
A strong character is one who stands up for what he/she believes in (whatever it is) and will put their life on the line, their life savings, or even the lives of their children. A strong character will risk the dangers of other people despising them because they hold to their Values even in an emergency.
Values that have to be discarded in order to deal effectively with an emergency were never held to begin with, only espoused or given lip-service. In emergencies, the real character becomes visible -- which is why most novels hurl the main character right into an emergency (trust me, a first date is an Emgergency!)
Strong characters contain the potential for becoming Heroes and thus tend to die young or survive to ridiculously old ages.
For you astrologers, that's a placement of Pluto in the natal chart signifying a life of having strength of character tested. Usually that "test" is one period of 3-5 years of sheer-bloody-hell -- and then either a dramatic death or smooth sailing into really old age. Many don't survive that test, but that doesn't mean they "failed" -- because the strength built in the testing period will still be there in their next life.
For MOTHERS - consider what that means in your infant, toddler, especially a venturesome son. Strength of character from previous lives turns up in those fearless lunges into dangers the baby does not perceive. The cowardice of the terrible-twos (and the fearless lunges into wild self-assertion) may be decoded into some idea of "who" this person you're raising really is, was, and will be.
Note, today Romance stories with second-marriages, and including young children, abound for a reason. Sometimes a marriage happens for past-life reasons, and to bring to birth certain individuals who need different parenting than the birth parent can provide. (not always, though).
So, considering brain research that is chasing the link between how the brain develops and violent videogames, what are the chances a modern teen will find fun activities among peers to develop social interactions that build character strength, solutions to social problems that don't involve "beating" or "winning" or out-maneuvering other people? How many teens see life not as a contest to win but as an arena in which to build a structure that need have no limits?
Will teens raised on solving problems by killing to "score" even recognize "strong characters" in their Romance stories?
What video games award double-points for avoiding harm to the 'bad guys?'
By what criteria do we judge character? And by what criteria should we judge character?
Remember the research article -- I think I pointed it out to you here some years ago -- that shows how the whole human species millions of years ago was twice reduced to nearly below species survival numbers? Two bottlenecks in our evolution stripped out entire genetic characteristics.
That is similar to the Biblical history that indicates how Adam and Eve arrived in our reality out of "The Garden of Eden" and proceeded to have children -- and later, The Flood reduced us to just Noah and his family with the Rainbow as the promise that the world would not be destroyed by flood again (didn't eliminate other means.)
The Bible indicates Seven Laws were given to Noah. That's all the moral code humanity as a whole is responsible for, not all 10 Commandments (or 613 given in the Desert) -- just 7 catch-all principles.
With Free Will, each individual human must personally choose to accept these 7 rules of behavior and implement them in their life.
Those who choose to do that, and don't toss those 7 away just because there's an "emergency" are considered of "strong character" (not just by readers, but by editors, too).
In fact, these 7 Noachide Laws are the most effective ways to handle "emergencies" -- and what the person searching for a Soul Mate looks for is that behavior in emergency (great plot fodder there! The third date can be a major emergency!) which applies those 7 Laws rigorously to generate a solution.
That kind of "strong character" who bends the world to his values is usually looked up to as a Leader. "Leadership" means not just getting people to follow you (like Captain Kirk on ST: ToS ) but living a life which spurs others to become leaders. The character to inspire and nurture Leadership in others is what any woman would look for in a potential father for her half-orphaned children. Then her children would become leaders with strong character.
Leadership is (as any trained actor will point out) entirely described not just in the tone of voice (as we find in audiobooks) but evidenced in the GAIT -- the way a person walks, at least if he/she is young and not arthritic. Consider that as a subliminal element in the "Love At First Sight" syndrome.
You might want to study the British import TV show Masterpiece: Downton Abbey for the character of the new Valet who shows up in the first episode of the first season and is summarily rejected by the other servants because he's a "cripple" (i.e. has a leg injury from military service - class society rejects cripples just as a flock of ducks would). The master of the House hired him as the new Valet because he's an old friend, but didn't know he had an unhealed injury and couldn't carry trays and so forth. The Butler urges the Master to fire the fellow, and the Master does that. The new Valet accepts the decree with a very civil, quiet objection to the Master's face saying only that he has nowhere else to go and it's unlikely anyone would hire him, and then he has a private cry because he has nowhere else to go. But at the last second, as the new Valet is leaving, the Master rescinds his edict, and with embarrassment says "We'll say no more about it."
The discovery that the new Valet's performance is impaired is (for the Master) an "emergency" - and at first he tosses his personal rules of honor away in order to conform to the "standards" of the house's servants. This is what a weak character does. Then he reasserts himself, thus "showing" us rather than "telling" us that the Master of this house is a man of "strong character." Thus the entire issue of who will inherit the estate becomes much more important because we care about strong characters -- but not weak ones.
The Master and the new Valet, of all the characters introduced in the first episode, pop out of the screen as "strong characters."
Meanwhile, another one of the servants, displaced by the new Valet from promotion to "Valet to the Master," turns out to be a blackmailer trying to blackmail a Duke about a gay affair (in that time and society a blackmail issue). So we are shown rather than told by stark contrast what the character of the new Valet is compared to that of the former Valet who is dominated by jealousy and manipulates with force.
The former Valet is shown to be of weak character, not a leader. The camera work on the new Valet focuses mainly on the eyes, and the steady gazes of pure Heroism he gives the Master of the House (who obviously was a superior officer to the new Valet in service in South Africa.) They are men of different ranks, different stations in life, but they are both Heroes, strong characters. One is appointed Leader by his born station in life, the other has attained leadership qualities by sheer determination. But he starts out at the very bottom of the pecking order in this household's staff.
You see that exact thing in both the Villain and the Hero -- but it is most visible in the Mystical Leader, the Gandalf or Yoda of the Romance story. That, to me, seems to be the kind of character the new Valet is set up to play - advisor.
Any one of the 7 Noachide Laws will provide you with enough theme and plot to support the steamiest Romance story of Love At First Sight leading to a Soul Mate bond that creates a Happily Ever After.
These are core thematic principles that subsume all human cultures all around the world -- translation may be a bit more difficult.
What are these catch-all principles of such powerful use to Romance writers?
THE 7 LAWS (see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Noahide_Laws
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The seven laws listed by the Tosefta and the Talmud are[7]
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These 7 rules are the "Rules of the Game" and apply to all human relationships, but especially to the sexual one.
"Sportsmanship" is essential and teaches good sexual relationships if the sport is played to develop your style of human interaction rather than to demolish the opposition. In real sportsmanship that models real life, you see opposing interests cooperating to develop each others' strength of character. In youthful sports, children can re-possess themselves of the lessons driven home by previous life challenges and set off to live a much more productive life this time, one with a genuine Happily Ever After.
You can set up innate conflicts within each one of these (don't try to tackle all of them in one novel; you'll create a mishmosh). A Hero, a Villain and a Mystic will each interpret these 7 concepts in different ways and apply them in different ways. They will work at cross purposes, then toss their tools aside and go at one another to make the other stop interfering. And in the end, both "win."
You can't stick with these 7 Noachide Laws through emergencies and not win because these rules do not apply to a zero-sum-game reality model. They are predicated on the assumption that there is a Creator who is limitless and is creating our reality to be limitless, or at least sufficiently elastic to seem so.
Read Rule #5 again and you'll see what I mean. Land, Water, Oil, Herds, Money, Wealth, physical resources of all sorts are not to be fought over even if the apparent consequence is a loss. Strength of character means proceeding through a conflict over material wealth (such as a divorce?) without deviating from the path you would have taken had the challenge not appeared.
In the zero-sum-game of reality, if one person is wealthy, then that means many others will be poor because there is only so much wealth to go around. And if we look at our world in a certain way, that is a clear and obvious truth. "If those people control that water, then I don't control it and therefore they will not let me water my animals and I will die and so will my children. Therefore I have to kill those people."
In the Noachide model of reality, thinking like that violates both Rule #5 and Rule #1 because you have made an "idol" (a source of the solutions to your problems) out of your own actions. You assume that you and only you can solve the problem and that if you don't do this, then necessarily that will happen. Same problem as the lifeboat problem, a classic philosophical conundrum.
The Hero with a strong character will put his life, and his family's life, on the line in order to avoid violating either (nevermind both) of those rules. The Villain with a strong character will do exactly the same, but upholding different rules, or the same rules with different interpretation.
The strong character would rather die than violate a rule of that level. The weak character will toss the rules of his or her life overboard because it's an emergency. The real Villain will use one of the set of 7 rules to prove that a behavior violating another one of the rules is "right." The real Hero does it more like Spock did in ST:ToS -- if it's deemed necessary to do something dishonorable, then willingly accept the consequences which are determined by others.
"Values" are the prioritized lists of individual applications of these 7 principles. "Maturation" is the process of organizing your listed priorities -- what would you do to avoid doing whatever?
Understanding how your opponent is another version of yourself with a different prioritized list of Values, how each of us is a unique individual muddling through "Life" as best we can, helps you sort out Heroes, Villains, Adversaries, and Opponents. Any one, with any oddball list of priorities, can be a Strong Character or a Weak Character. The biggest fiction market is for "Strong" characters -- in Hero, Villain, and Mystic.
If the Hero and the Villain are Soul Mates, you have got a winner, what they call in Hollywood a "four-bagger" that appeals to all ages at all levels of affluence. In my novels, especially The Farris Channel, the Mystic is the Leader trying to make leaders out of the Hero and the Villain. It's a multi-lifetime endeavor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
The blog is:
http://charactersinsimegen.blogspot.com/
Sometime next week (March 12-16, 2012) the audiobook of the first novel in Sime~Gen, House of Zeor, is slated to be released as audiobook from audible.com (on Amazon and iTunes etc) and so far the fans who have heard samples of Michael Spence's reading are absolutely thrilled with his rendition of the main characters in that novel, Heroic, Villainous and Mystical alike.
While I've been working on the audiobook project (Molt Brother is out, City of a Million Legends is being recorded, and Michael is getting ready to start Unto Zeor, Forever), and thinking about characters and actor's renditions of characters, on Google+ I found the following link to a newspaper article being shared that made a big impression on me:
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/health/2011/12/violent_video_games_may_affect.html
It's about brain research chasing a link between violent video games and the behavior of children who grow up playing them. It doesn't site conclusive evidence, but it's "hot pursuit" time in this area.
We all know the link between sexuality and violence, and how "dark" sex-based fiction can get especially when the Romance is left completely in the dust by mechanical sex scenes.
I'm all for really good sex scenes, mind you, but they have to be essential to the theme, make a clear statement, and advance the plot swiftly while deepening the flow of story. Good sex scenes are harder to write than good combat and violence scenes. Good sex is a form of communication, a language of love. Substituting anatomy for announcements is weak writing.
MY OPINION ON THAT ARTICLE: It's not "sports" or "videogames" that cause "violence" -- it's the enactment of the "zero sum game" model of reality.
A sex scene that's a "zero-sum-game" will be an announcement of aggression that will be an act of dominance and maybe violence. Do you only love and treasure what you dominate? ("Dominate" means to be able to "take away" (I have/ you don't zero-sum-game model) anything from possessions to self-esteem from another human being.)
"Sportsmanship" used to include celebration that the other guy won, not you, and you didn't have less of anything because the other guy scored more points: not less prestige, strutting rights, joy, or anything. It wasn't a zero sum game even with rules and scores.
"It doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game that counts." (Honor, integrity, fairness). As society has evolved over the last few decades, we can see in our films and novels how that concept of sportsmanship became ironic, then ridiculous, and now isn't even said.
Sports is about honor and heroism, about helping the fallen get up and go at it again, about breaking through your own inner, personal barriers and becoming a better person (and not on drugs) -- not better than some other person you "beat" but better than you, yourself were. Sports is about excellence (as is Sime~Gen's House of Zeor) - it's about excelling your own personal-best, not about excelling someone else's personal best.
It's not "sports" that's the problem in our current society; it's sanctioned viciousness. Sports used to be an exercise in character development. Now it's more like politics, an exercise in character debasement. What you practice, you get better at.
But that's the world we live in, isn't it? The world of raising children by debasing their characters to where they only know how to "win" by debasing the character of others.
How many mothers out there ever even notice their kids staring at political ads? How much do the kids understand? What do they model from that? How does that affect what they look for in a Soul Mate -- someone they can easily debase, or someone they will allow to debase them?
MY OPINION: No, no, no!
This world is made out of love for love, and because of love. That's not my opinion. It's my perception. It's what I see when I look out of my eyes and assemble all the little pixel-dots and the black space around them (an image I used in a previous discussion here of a trilogy of historical romance novels set around 1050 C. E.)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html
Character is one of the "filters" you use to "select" what is signal and what is noise in your life around you. Your character is what selects what lights up the pixels that form your image of your life, and what you suppress or ignore. These bits of information form a picture of the world around you that you can work with and within.
It's your character, and the assessment of the character of others that creates that picture of the world, your life, and your potential.
Ask most readers of Romance stories and you'll find that' it's character they respond to most. If they can't relate to the main character, they just won't finish the book. Romance books need "strong" characters -- characters with character.
You know, USA NETWORK's "characters welcome!"
One of the things writers use to add "color" to characters is the techniques used to "reveal" their character strengths, weaknesses, and the identifying, individual quirks.
When you weave all those character traits together, strength, weakness, quirks, you get a "strong" character, a character who doesn't change behavior or values in an emergency -- a character that's been built from childhood in a non-zero-sum-game world. That's a character who has the "strength" to "give" himself - to sacrifice for the good of others.
The "strong" character will create a good cause, not just find one. The "strong" character is the one who loses a child to a drunk-driver accident, and founds Alcoholics Anonymous or Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
The "weak" character is the one who loudly and publicly proclaims his "values" and "moral compass" and "leadership" and then, in any little emergency (unexpected event) throws all those values away in order to respond to the emergency.
Consider the classic "lifeboat" situation where say, 6 skinny people are huddled on a lifeboat tossed by high seas and a 7th very fat person is sinking the boat. It's an emergency, so the 6 skinny people are therefore morally required to throw away the "Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder" commandment and toss the fat person overboard for the good of the majority.
Those are 6 people of very weak character.
If they were of strong character and normally held that murder was not something they would ever participate in, they would never consider tossing anyone overboard merely for their own survival.
Those of strong character who believe that murder is wrong would never even consider murder in large groups like a mob. The force of "mob psychology" and destructive frenzy explosively released in resentment simply leaves such a "strong character" cold. A strong character standing in the midst of a mob that bursts into frenzy will simply edge to the rear and drift off down a side street. She may then circle back, get help, and confront the mob's head end and try to stop the destruction. But not with violence.
We're not talking "army" here; the army does not murder, but can and does "kill" for the good of the group, which is completely sanctioned by the 10 Commandments. Translations usually say "kill" but the actual text says "murder." That's killing for personal gain, not self defense. Soldiers don't set out to kill people, just to "neutralize" them -- make them stop destroying the soldier's own family and nation.
That "Kill"/"Murder" distinction is one I use in the Sime~Gen novels because I thought about it very carefully and studied and learned.
Now why is it relevant to a writer creating a Romance story? I mean most Romance doesn't involve killing or murder (though I do love a good detective novel with a hot romance driving the plot.)
It's relevant because "Values" has everything to do with "character strength" which is the lynchpin in the whole Soul Mate concept.
Character is the connecting link because it is the one thing that you can "take with you" beyond this life. What character strength you develop in this life will be there for you to retrieve (by repeating some experiences, sometimes vicariously by just reading a Romance story) once you reincarnate. That's the theory anyway, and it turns up in so many theories of karma and reincarnation that I suspect it's real. It certainly resonates with a majority of readers and forms the foundation of most fiction that doesn't even deal with the supernatural.
I use the idea of murder to measure character strength just as an illustration of the principle of what makes a "strong" character in the eyes of an editor.
A strong character is one who stands up for what he/she believes in (whatever it is) and will put their life on the line, their life savings, or even the lives of their children. A strong character will risk the dangers of other people despising them because they hold to their Values even in an emergency.
Values that have to be discarded in order to deal effectively with an emergency were never held to begin with, only espoused or given lip-service. In emergencies, the real character becomes visible -- which is why most novels hurl the main character right into an emergency (trust me, a first date is an Emgergency!)
Strong characters contain the potential for becoming Heroes and thus tend to die young or survive to ridiculously old ages.
For you astrologers, that's a placement of Pluto in the natal chart signifying a life of having strength of character tested. Usually that "test" is one period of 3-5 years of sheer-bloody-hell -- and then either a dramatic death or smooth sailing into really old age. Many don't survive that test, but that doesn't mean they "failed" -- because the strength built in the testing period will still be there in their next life.
For MOTHERS - consider what that means in your infant, toddler, especially a venturesome son. Strength of character from previous lives turns up in those fearless lunges into dangers the baby does not perceive. The cowardice of the terrible-twos (and the fearless lunges into wild self-assertion) may be decoded into some idea of "who" this person you're raising really is, was, and will be.
Note, today Romance stories with second-marriages, and including young children, abound for a reason. Sometimes a marriage happens for past-life reasons, and to bring to birth certain individuals who need different parenting than the birth parent can provide. (not always, though).
So, considering brain research that is chasing the link between how the brain develops and violent videogames, what are the chances a modern teen will find fun activities among peers to develop social interactions that build character strength, solutions to social problems that don't involve "beating" or "winning" or out-maneuvering other people? How many teens see life not as a contest to win but as an arena in which to build a structure that need have no limits?
Will teens raised on solving problems by killing to "score" even recognize "strong characters" in their Romance stories?
What video games award double-points for avoiding harm to the 'bad guys?'
By what criteria do we judge character? And by what criteria should we judge character?
Remember the research article -- I think I pointed it out to you here some years ago -- that shows how the whole human species millions of years ago was twice reduced to nearly below species survival numbers? Two bottlenecks in our evolution stripped out entire genetic characteristics.
That is similar to the Biblical history that indicates how Adam and Eve arrived in our reality out of "The Garden of Eden" and proceeded to have children -- and later, The Flood reduced us to just Noah and his family with the Rainbow as the promise that the world would not be destroyed by flood again (didn't eliminate other means.)
The Bible indicates Seven Laws were given to Noah. That's all the moral code humanity as a whole is responsible for, not all 10 Commandments (or 613 given in the Desert) -- just 7 catch-all principles.
With Free Will, each individual human must personally choose to accept these 7 rules of behavior and implement them in their life.
Those who choose to do that, and don't toss those 7 away just because there's an "emergency" are considered of "strong character" (not just by readers, but by editors, too).
In fact, these 7 Noachide Laws are the most effective ways to handle "emergencies" -- and what the person searching for a Soul Mate looks for is that behavior in emergency (great plot fodder there! The third date can be a major emergency!) which applies those 7 Laws rigorously to generate a solution.
That kind of "strong character" who bends the world to his values is usually looked up to as a Leader. "Leadership" means not just getting people to follow you (like Captain Kirk on ST: ToS ) but living a life which spurs others to become leaders. The character to inspire and nurture Leadership in others is what any woman would look for in a potential father for her half-orphaned children. Then her children would become leaders with strong character.
Leadership is (as any trained actor will point out) entirely described not just in the tone of voice (as we find in audiobooks) but evidenced in the GAIT -- the way a person walks, at least if he/she is young and not arthritic. Consider that as a subliminal element in the "Love At First Sight" syndrome.
You might want to study the British import TV show Masterpiece: Downton Abbey for the character of the new Valet who shows up in the first episode of the first season and is summarily rejected by the other servants because he's a "cripple" (i.e. has a leg injury from military service - class society rejects cripples just as a flock of ducks would). The master of the House hired him as the new Valet because he's an old friend, but didn't know he had an unhealed injury and couldn't carry trays and so forth. The Butler urges the Master to fire the fellow, and the Master does that. The new Valet accepts the decree with a very civil, quiet objection to the Master's face saying only that he has nowhere else to go and it's unlikely anyone would hire him, and then he has a private cry because he has nowhere else to go. But at the last second, as the new Valet is leaving, the Master rescinds his edict, and with embarrassment says "We'll say no more about it."
The discovery that the new Valet's performance is impaired is (for the Master) an "emergency" - and at first he tosses his personal rules of honor away in order to conform to the "standards" of the house's servants. This is what a weak character does. Then he reasserts himself, thus "showing" us rather than "telling" us that the Master of this house is a man of "strong character." Thus the entire issue of who will inherit the estate becomes much more important because we care about strong characters -- but not weak ones.
The Master and the new Valet, of all the characters introduced in the first episode, pop out of the screen as "strong characters."
Meanwhile, another one of the servants, displaced by the new Valet from promotion to "Valet to the Master," turns out to be a blackmailer trying to blackmail a Duke about a gay affair (in that time and society a blackmail issue). So we are shown rather than told by stark contrast what the character of the new Valet is compared to that of the former Valet who is dominated by jealousy and manipulates with force.
The former Valet is shown to be of weak character, not a leader. The camera work on the new Valet focuses mainly on the eyes, and the steady gazes of pure Heroism he gives the Master of the House (who obviously was a superior officer to the new Valet in service in South Africa.) They are men of different ranks, different stations in life, but they are both Heroes, strong characters. One is appointed Leader by his born station in life, the other has attained leadership qualities by sheer determination. But he starts out at the very bottom of the pecking order in this household's staff.
Even the crippled Leader (Wounded Warrior) has a way of moving, holding the head, using the eyes steadily, an expression engraved in wrinkles, that bespeaks confidence that can only come from having forged a path through emergency after emergency without tossing out their core Values.
You see that exact thing in both the Villain and the Hero -- but it is most visible in the Mystical Leader, the Gandalf or Yoda of the Romance story. That, to me, seems to be the kind of character the new Valet is set up to play - advisor.
Any one of the 7 Noachide Laws will provide you with enough theme and plot to support the steamiest Romance story of Love At First Sight leading to a Soul Mate bond that creates a Happily Ever After.
These are core thematic principles that subsume all human cultures all around the world -- translation may be a bit more difficult.
What are these catch-all principles of such powerful use to Romance writers?
THE 7 LAWS (see wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Noahide_Laws
-------------
The seven laws listed by the Tosefta and the Talmud are[7]
- Prohibition of Idolatry
- Prohibition of Murder
- Prohibition of Theft
- Prohibition of Sexual immorality
- Prohibition of Blasphemy
- Prohibition of eating flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive
- Establishment of courts of law
--------------
These 7 rules are the "Rules of the Game" and apply to all human relationships, but especially to the sexual one.
"Sportsmanship" is essential and teaches good sexual relationships if the sport is played to develop your style of human interaction rather than to demolish the opposition. In real sportsmanship that models real life, you see opposing interests cooperating to develop each others' strength of character. In youthful sports, children can re-possess themselves of the lessons driven home by previous life challenges and set off to live a much more productive life this time, one with a genuine Happily Ever After.
You can set up innate conflicts within each one of these (don't try to tackle all of them in one novel; you'll create a mishmosh). A Hero, a Villain and a Mystic will each interpret these 7 concepts in different ways and apply them in different ways. They will work at cross purposes, then toss their tools aside and go at one another to make the other stop interfering. And in the end, both "win."
You can't stick with these 7 Noachide Laws through emergencies and not win because these rules do not apply to a zero-sum-game reality model. They are predicated on the assumption that there is a Creator who is limitless and is creating our reality to be limitless, or at least sufficiently elastic to seem so.
Read Rule #5 again and you'll see what I mean. Land, Water, Oil, Herds, Money, Wealth, physical resources of all sorts are not to be fought over even if the apparent consequence is a loss. Strength of character means proceeding through a conflict over material wealth (such as a divorce?) without deviating from the path you would have taken had the challenge not appeared.
In the zero-sum-game of reality, if one person is wealthy, then that means many others will be poor because there is only so much wealth to go around. And if we look at our world in a certain way, that is a clear and obvious truth. "If those people control that water, then I don't control it and therefore they will not let me water my animals and I will die and so will my children. Therefore I have to kill those people."
In the Noachide model of reality, thinking like that violates both Rule #5 and Rule #1 because you have made an "idol" (a source of the solutions to your problems) out of your own actions. You assume that you and only you can solve the problem and that if you don't do this, then necessarily that will happen. Same problem as the lifeboat problem, a classic philosophical conundrum.
The Hero with a strong character will put his life, and his family's life, on the line in order to avoid violating either (nevermind both) of those rules. The Villain with a strong character will do exactly the same, but upholding different rules, or the same rules with different interpretation.
The strong character would rather die than violate a rule of that level. The weak character will toss the rules of his or her life overboard because it's an emergency. The real Villain will use one of the set of 7 rules to prove that a behavior violating another one of the rules is "right." The real Hero does it more like Spock did in ST:ToS -- if it's deemed necessary to do something dishonorable, then willingly accept the consequences which are determined by others.
"Values" are the prioritized lists of individual applications of these 7 principles. "Maturation" is the process of organizing your listed priorities -- what would you do to avoid doing whatever?
Understanding how your opponent is another version of yourself with a different prioritized list of Values, how each of us is a unique individual muddling through "Life" as best we can, helps you sort out Heroes, Villains, Adversaries, and Opponents. Any one, with any oddball list of priorities, can be a Strong Character or a Weak Character. The biggest fiction market is for "Strong" characters -- in Hero, Villain, and Mystic.
If the Hero and the Villain are Soul Mates, you have got a winner, what they call in Hollywood a "four-bagger" that appeals to all ages at all levels of affluence. In my novels, especially The Farris Channel, the Mystic is the Leader trying to make leaders out of the Hero and the Villain. It's a multi-lifetime endeavor.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Thursday, March 01, 2012
Fairy Tales Among Us
Has anyone been watching the new TV programs GRIMM and ONCE UPON A TIME? Two series debuting in the same season about fairy tale characters living in the modern world, but very different in tone and in their development of the premise. The "Grimms" are people who can recognize supernatural creatures for what they are and, if the creatures are evil, fight them. The hero, a homicide detective, has recently discovered he's a Grimm and encounters situations reminiscent of different classic legends every week.
I gave up on GRIMM after a few episodes, but I'm faithfully following ONCE UPON A TIME. The Evil Queen from "Snow White" has put a curse on the fairy tale folk by transporting them to a world where happy endings can't happen—ours! They're trapped in a town where the Queen rules as mayor, and they don't remember their true identities. The only characters who do remember the fairy tale world are the Queen and Rumpelstiltskin. Similar to FOREVER KNIGHT and HIGHLANDER, this series intersperses present-day action with flashbacks. In ONCE UPON A TIME the flashbacks reveal what happened in the fairy tale realm before the evil spell was cast, experiences that the characters have forgotten but that nevertheless shape their relationships in our world.
If you want to catch up on either series, the Innsmouth Free Press reviews and analyzes every episode of both in detail:
Innsmouth Free Press
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
I gave up on GRIMM after a few episodes, but I'm faithfully following ONCE UPON A TIME. The Evil Queen from "Snow White" has put a curse on the fairy tale folk by transporting them to a world where happy endings can't happen—ours! They're trapped in a town where the Queen rules as mayor, and they don't remember their true identities. The only characters who do remember the fairy tale world are the Queen and Rumpelstiltskin. Similar to FOREVER KNIGHT and HIGHLANDER, this series intersperses present-day action with flashbacks. In ONCE UPON A TIME the flashbacks reveal what happened in the fairy tale realm before the evil spell was cast, experiences that the characters have forgotten but that nevertheless shape their relationships in our world.
If you want to catch up on either series, the Innsmouth Free Press reviews and analyzes every episode of both in detail:
Innsmouth Free Press
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic
Last November, while I was sending out the contracts for the stories in my upcoming Vampire anthology (Vampire's Dilemma edited by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah, but none of the 10 stories are by us), an email dropped into my box from a Sime~Gen fan and it blew my mind. It's from a fellow who is a writer, as well as a reader. That gives it much more significance in my mind.
This Sime~Gen reader found the new 2011 Sime~Gen novels at the Darkover Grand Council meeting in Maryland where Karen MacLeod had brought a box of the books to sell.
Karen posted the following in the SIMEGEN Group on Facebook:
---------------
Interesting comments about the new Sime~Gen books I was selling for Jacqueline and Jean at Darkover Grand Council.
(1) There ARE NO NEW Sime~Gen Books. The series stopped years ago.
(2) After showing people the books: "Those are NOT Sime~Gen books."
(3) I'm SO GLAD to see new Sime~Gen books at last. I hope there will be more of them.
ALL of the books Jean and Wildside provided me were SOLD very quickly. I should have had more of them.
-------------
The Darkover Grand Council meeting (a science fiction con) was started by Darkover fans to focus on the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley who was Guest of Honor at the first one. I was fan Guest of Honor and had won the contest to name the convention. At that time I headed a Darkover fan group called Keeper's Tower.
That convention moved, changed dates, and has had various chairpersons, but mostly is run by the same people who started it and still has the name I gave it. Even today, years after Marion's passing, the convention groups a bundle of related interests together and draws Darkover fans from around the country to Maryland on Thanksgiving weekend. I was at most of them until I moved to Arizona.
So this fellow who bought new Sime~Gen paper editions at Darkover emailed Jean Lorrah and I to say how enjoyable they were and give us a URL with further commentary.
http://www.dhr2believe.net/ive-waited-twenty-years-to-read-the-next-book-in-a-series-now-the-series-is-back
That link should lead you to the fiction written by this reader.
Here's a quote from that entry:
-----Quote from Highmage -----------
What made the Sime-Gen Series brilliant was Jacqueline’s vision of the future and the life and death nature of that future… Humanity mutates, dividing humanity into two species – one of which seems to be parasitic. Yet there are those who realize that the mutation is meant to be symbiotic and seek to end all the killing that threatens the extinction of both branches of humanity. With the mutation the world as we know if comes to an end and the two species establish territories – which don’t recognize the other as human beings. The Gens look just like us, but that’s not the truth – they produce a substance called selyn, which the Simes need to survive.
These stories span centuries of history taking readers into questions of what it means to be human and feel so poignant they are timeless.
There isn’t a Sime-Gen book that I haven’t read at least five times, so I’m thrilled to be reading the first new stories in years. There are two new volumes Personal Recognizance/The Story Untold (a double edition) and To Kiss of To Kill, and, a third, I understand, is coming out in 2012.
------End Quote-------------
The third he mentions is The Farris Channel, Sime~Gen #12, (Personal Recognizance is numbered separately from The Sory Untold ) and is now available in paper and ebook.
The comments on how "re-readable" the Sime~Gen novels are tell me that I did achieve my objective of writing novels that would be worth their cover price because they weren't (as publishers insisted anything labeled SF be) read-and-toss novels.
Romance novels likewise are considered read-and-toss, not worth keeping for your grandchildren, not worth re-reading 10 years later.
But I wrote for the future reader as well as about an imaginary future. I set the stories in a time after the collapse of this civilization, so everything was "the same but different." As a result, the novels don't suffer from out-dated technology in the stories.
The most "contemporary" settings in the series were in Unto Zeor, Forever and Mahogany Trinrose as well as RenSime. They are now "historical" for us.
The new novel, Personal Recognizance, is set at a time when universities are just getting used to mainframe computers on campus.
One nice advantage of e-books is that they don't get dog-eared, dirty, coffee-stained and the binding doesn't fall apart when you re-read them 10 times or more. Publishers doing science fiction or romance as original paperbacks package the books to be read once and discarded. The paper yellows and crumbles, the binding fails, the beautiful art on the cover gets creased and ripped. They don't expect the stories to be durable, so the package is not either.
The ebook and downloadable audio (i.e. with no physical disk to lose or wear out) is really taking off now that there are good "readers" such as Kindle, Nook, and various handhelds, phones and tablets (most of which read your audiobooks as well as ebooks). Here are current 2011 statistics from Publisher's Weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/50805-aap-estimates-e-book-sales-rose-117-in-2011-as-print-fell.html
-----QUOTE-----
...while downloadable audio rose 25.5% for the year.
So these statistics make me joyful that the audiobook of Sime~Gen #1 House of Zeor will be out in a few weeks.
Over the last few years in this blog, we've been exploring why Romance and Science Fiction (worse yet, the combination) are regarded as read-and-toss -- as if something inherent in the genre itself prevented the existence of classics that would out-last the author, or of classics you would save to give to your children who would give them to your grandchildren.
As you've seen with the passing of Anne McCaffrey last November, her novels are still enchanting new young readers -- and may well soon be a film or series of films, possibly going on to television.
This field, SF, Fantasy, Romance, and every criss-crossing combination, has already produced lasting classics recommended by older readers for younger ones. When I began selling my fiction, that was a laughable idea. Star Trek changed a lot, but not the attitude that nothing called "science fiction" could ever be a classic.
Today, Star Trek itself is such a classic, spanning generations and a new film-based universe is starting to appear.
I began selling my science fiction before I wrote the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! but I learned a lot about creating "classic" science fiction by studying Star Trek. I used what I learned, and refined my technique, and believed Sime~Gen would last. It's only now old enough that testimony of the kind produced by this reader counts (who is using the web to hone his writing craft -- see last week's post ...
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/amateur-goes-professional.html
...for more on how to use the web to hone writing craftsmanship.)
It's possible that I really have created a classic. A few more decades and we may know.
My Tuesday entries on this blog have been focused on leading you through what I learned from studying Star Trek, Darkover, and many classics (such as Thubway Tham that I talked about last week), so that you can write with confidence and look forward to getting reader responses like this.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
This Sime~Gen reader found the new 2011 Sime~Gen novels at the Darkover Grand Council meeting in Maryland where Karen MacLeod had brought a box of the books to sell.
Karen posted the following in the SIMEGEN Group on Facebook:
---------------
Interesting comments about the new Sime~Gen books I was selling for Jacqueline and Jean at Darkover Grand Council.
(1) There ARE NO NEW Sime~Gen Books. The series stopped years ago.
(2) After showing people the books: "Those are NOT Sime~Gen books."
(3) I'm SO GLAD to see new Sime~Gen books at last. I hope there will be more of them.
ALL of the books Jean and Wildside provided me were SOLD very quickly. I should have had more of them.
-------------
The Darkover Grand Council meeting (a science fiction con) was started by Darkover fans to focus on the Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley who was Guest of Honor at the first one. I was fan Guest of Honor and had won the contest to name the convention. At that time I headed a Darkover fan group called Keeper's Tower.
That convention moved, changed dates, and has had various chairpersons, but mostly is run by the same people who started it and still has the name I gave it. Even today, years after Marion's passing, the convention groups a bundle of related interests together and draws Darkover fans from around the country to Maryland on Thanksgiving weekend. I was at most of them until I moved to Arizona.
So this fellow who bought new Sime~Gen paper editions at Darkover emailed Jean Lorrah and I to say how enjoyable they were and give us a URL with further commentary.
http://www.dhr2believe.net/ive-waited-twenty-years-to-read-the-next-book-in-a-series-now-the-series-is-back
That link should lead you to the fiction written by this reader.
Here's a quote from that entry:
-----Quote from Highmage -----------
What made the Sime-Gen Series brilliant was Jacqueline’s vision of the future and the life and death nature of that future… Humanity mutates, dividing humanity into two species – one of which seems to be parasitic. Yet there are those who realize that the mutation is meant to be symbiotic and seek to end all the killing that threatens the extinction of both branches of humanity. With the mutation the world as we know if comes to an end and the two species establish territories – which don’t recognize the other as human beings. The Gens look just like us, but that’s not the truth – they produce a substance called selyn, which the Simes need to survive.
These stories span centuries of history taking readers into questions of what it means to be human and feel so poignant they are timeless.
There isn’t a Sime-Gen book that I haven’t read at least five times, so I’m thrilled to be reading the first new stories in years. There are two new volumes Personal Recognizance/The Story Untold (a double edition) and To Kiss of To Kill, and, a third, I understand, is coming out in 2012.
------End Quote-------------
The third he mentions is The Farris Channel, Sime~Gen #12, (Personal Recognizance is numbered separately from The Sory Untold ) and is now available in paper and ebook.
The comments on how "re-readable" the Sime~Gen novels are tell me that I did achieve my objective of writing novels that would be worth their cover price because they weren't (as publishers insisted anything labeled SF be) read-and-toss novels.
Romance novels likewise are considered read-and-toss, not worth keeping for your grandchildren, not worth re-reading 10 years later.
But I wrote for the future reader as well as about an imaginary future. I set the stories in a time after the collapse of this civilization, so everything was "the same but different." As a result, the novels don't suffer from out-dated technology in the stories.
The most "contemporary" settings in the series were in Unto Zeor, Forever and Mahogany Trinrose as well as RenSime. They are now "historical" for us.
The new novel, Personal Recognizance, is set at a time when universities are just getting used to mainframe computers on campus.
One nice advantage of e-books is that they don't get dog-eared, dirty, coffee-stained and the binding doesn't fall apart when you re-read them 10 times or more. Publishers doing science fiction or romance as original paperbacks package the books to be read once and discarded. The paper yellows and crumbles, the binding fails, the beautiful art on the cover gets creased and ripped. They don't expect the stories to be durable, so the package is not either.
The ebook and downloadable audio (i.e. with no physical disk to lose or wear out) is really taking off now that there are good "readers" such as Kindle, Nook, and various handhelds, phones and tablets (most of which read your audiobooks as well as ebooks). Here are current 2011 statistics from Publisher's Weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/50805-aap-estimates-e-book-sales-rose-117-in-2011-as-print-fell.html
-----QUOTE-----
...while downloadable audio rose 25.5% for the year.
In December, e-book sales rose 72% and the AAP noted that based a
seasonal buying patterns it expects e-book sales to show strong gains in
January and possible February as well as new digital device owners buy
more titles. In the month, sales of children’s hardcover books rose,
but sales fell in the other trade categories.
-----END QUOTE------So these statistics make me joyful that the audiobook of Sime~Gen #1 House of Zeor will be out in a few weeks.
Over the last few years in this blog, we've been exploring why Romance and Science Fiction (worse yet, the combination) are regarded as read-and-toss -- as if something inherent in the genre itself prevented the existence of classics that would out-last the author, or of classics you would save to give to your children who would give them to your grandchildren.
As you've seen with the passing of Anne McCaffrey last November, her novels are still enchanting new young readers -- and may well soon be a film or series of films, possibly going on to television.
This field, SF, Fantasy, Romance, and every criss-crossing combination, has already produced lasting classics recommended by older readers for younger ones. When I began selling my fiction, that was a laughable idea. Star Trek changed a lot, but not the attitude that nothing called "science fiction" could ever be a classic.
Today, Star Trek itself is such a classic, spanning generations and a new film-based universe is starting to appear.
I began selling my science fiction before I wrote the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! but I learned a lot about creating "classic" science fiction by studying Star Trek. I used what I learned, and refined my technique, and believed Sime~Gen would last. It's only now old enough that testimony of the kind produced by this reader counts (who is using the web to hone his writing craft -- see last week's post ...
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/amateur-goes-professional.html
...for more on how to use the web to hone writing craftsmanship.)
It's possible that I really have created a classic. A few more decades and we may know.
My Tuesday entries on this blog have been focused on leading you through what I learned from studying Star Trek, Darkover, and many classics (such as Thubway Tham that I talked about last week), so that you can write with confidence and look forward to getting reader responses like this.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Thinking About Antagonists
Recently I watched the Frank Sinatra movie A HOLE IN THE HEAD, which I saw as a child when it first came out (1959). From what little I remembered of the story, I thought of it as a romantic comedy, with the widowed father protagonist, Tony, torn between his free-spirited girlfriend who lacks any interest in family or marriage and the sweet, homebody young widow his sister-in-law introduces him to. As it turns out, the romantic thread remains a subplot, with the girlfriend departing for an unknown destination and the young widow becoming a friend rather than a lover. The main story centers on the hero’s conflict with his straitlaced, workaholic older brother, Mario. Mario and his wife fly down from New York to Miami, determined to straighten out Tony by marrying him to a sensible woman and getting him set up in a solid business, or, if that project fails, to take Tony’s preteen son back to New York and give the boy a “normal” life.
This movie provides a great example of an antagonist who is not a villain, simply a well-meaning man pursuing goals that seem right to him. Mario and his wife have a perfectly good motive for urging Tony to quit his position as manager of a hotel that has been a financial failure (he’s so far in debt that the landlord is about to terminate the lease) and abandon his get-rich-quick schemes. They sincerely believe Tony is on the road to ruin, and the audience can see their point. We can also understand why they think a nearly bankrupt beachfront hotel isn’t a proper environment for a motherless boy to grow up in. Although Mario is overbearing, bullheaded, and not very likable, he acts out of an underlying love. At the same time, the obvious love between Tony and his son makes us root for the two to stay together. As for giving up the hotel in favor of a shop somewhere in New York state, we can see from the beginning of the film that Tony just wouldn’t be himself anymore if he made that move.
In the end, Tony “wins,” not by “beating” his brother in straightforward conflict, but through Mario’s own realization that Tony and his son are happy together, and their happiness in their unconventional lifestyle trumps the considerations of financial security and conventional family life that Mario originally wanted to force on them. At the same time, Tony undergoes a crisis that awakens him to becoming a bit more responsible without losing his essential free-spirited nature. And Mario even decides he should take a vacation instead of rushing back to his New York business. The final scene of Mario, his wife, Tony, Tony’s son, and the young widow frolicking on the beach is a lovely “show not tell” of reconciliation among characters who clashed through most of the story.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
This movie provides a great example of an antagonist who is not a villain, simply a well-meaning man pursuing goals that seem right to him. Mario and his wife have a perfectly good motive for urging Tony to quit his position as manager of a hotel that has been a financial failure (he’s so far in debt that the landlord is about to terminate the lease) and abandon his get-rich-quick schemes. They sincerely believe Tony is on the road to ruin, and the audience can see their point. We can also understand why they think a nearly bankrupt beachfront hotel isn’t a proper environment for a motherless boy to grow up in. Although Mario is overbearing, bullheaded, and not very likable, he acts out of an underlying love. At the same time, the obvious love between Tony and his son makes us root for the two to stay together. As for giving up the hotel in favor of a shop somewhere in New York state, we can see from the beginning of the film that Tony just wouldn’t be himself anymore if he made that move.
In the end, Tony “wins,” not by “beating” his brother in straightforward conflict, but through Mario’s own realization that Tony and his son are happy together, and their happiness in their unconventional lifestyle trumps the considerations of financial security and conventional family life that Mario originally wanted to force on them. At the same time, Tony undergoes a crisis that awakens him to becoming a bit more responsible without losing his essential free-spirited nature. And Mario even decides he should take a vacation instead of rushing back to his New York business. The final scene of Mario, his wife, Tony, Tony’s son, and the young widow frolicking on the beach is a lovely “show not tell” of reconciliation among characters who clashed through most of the story.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
The Amateur Goes Professional
The Nanowrimo exercise always has beginning and professional writers talking all over facebook and twitter about how many words they produced in a day, or week, and declaring failure and dropping out of the race if they can't produce words by the yard.
Measuring of success at writing as a number of words has two sides to it:
a) many markets do pay by the "word" so the faster you produce the more money you make. Words/day = $/day = professionalism
b) but novel markets don't pay by the word but by the well turned, completed, plot with all supports in place to make it fun to read without much editing.
And then there's the non-fiction markets. Newspapers, print and online, pay by the article -- with a total subject covered within a specified number of words, K bytes, or space (lines, whatever).
Good writing is not measured by the number of words you produce -- if it were, then only short words would be professional. (one could argue that's the trend!)
However, there is something to be said for professionalism being measured in SPEED of production.
This measure is entirely market driven. Novels usually produce an advance against royalties and after the book has earned the advance, the author gets a little bit each time a copy sells. But that business model is dying very quickly.
The e-book market pays no advance, but a bigger royalty per copy sold. And books don't go out of print in a couple of weeks.
The e-author's business model then is not to write quickly, but to write something that will be talked about, tweeted about, commented on, and recommended on goodreads etc. The author's objective under the new business model must be to write solidly.
But there are bills to pay now. You can't mount a social media campaign if you can't pay your internet connection bill. So you must produce quickly, but also solidly.
This is a dilemma brought to my attention by the following tweet.
---------
SheviStories 11:44am via Tweet Button
Improv for Writers, Part 3: Speed Writer--learn to write FAST! shevi.blogspot.com/2011/11/improv… #litchat #kidlitchat #YALitChat #WritersRoad #NaNoWriMo
----------------------
Improv and Nanowrimo have something in common - training.
I've made this point many times in this blog - you don't "learn" to write, you "train" to write.
As I was taught when I was in elementary school, by the professional writer, Alma Hill, "Writing is a performing art."
This is also true of journalism where one must go out, get the story, come back and type it up for publication within the hour. The words have to be there, making sense, covering the entire topic with all the facts straight, and most of the spelling correct.
There's a college degree in journalism that gets you started, but nothing except practice actually brings that skill online for you.
And the same is true of fiction writing. Fiction is a performing art. Fiction writing is brought to professional levels and standards only by practice against a clock, against a deadline, or in competition.
That's the good thing in the nanowrimo exercise. Many people need "pressure" in an open forum, a classroom atmosphere, a newspaper's bullpen, or a filmmaker's pitch session to perfect these skills. Others master the skill set faster in private, and alone.
Most fiction-writer personalities actually do better in solitude -- at least up to a point.
So we are seeing a variety of these online open, public forum exercise halls appearing where creative people practice their skills. This crop of online trained writers will be the top tier of the profession within then next 20 years or so, the core of their career building years.
But the participants in such open exercises where they obsesses on words-by-the-day output as being "writers" will also be the occupants of the bottom tier of always-rejected writers. Those will be the folks who practiced their errors until their brains had literally incorporated the errors into their synapses and no further lessons can fix their errors.
Since the measure of professional success is $$$ income, which is caused by words-by-the-day output goals being met, and all the books on writing craft come to the same bottom line -- a million words for the garbage can before you produce anything worth selling -- how do you avoid ingraining errors?
I've seen careers go both ways -- each successive published novel a vast improvement over the last, or each successive novel repeating the same errors.
What can a beginning writer learn that can prevent that from happening to them?
That may be the wrong question. Let's phrase it another way.
Where can a beginning writer find out how to write fast? And just how fast is the right speed?
Back to the model of writing that Alma Hill taught me. Writing is a performing art. So look to the training processes in performing arts to find the best model for mastering novel writing at the professional level.
Look at the training of little girls in ballet class -- then look at a Master Class at the New York Ballet.
Look at a little boy's first violin lessons -- then look at the "lessons" taken by a member of the Philadelphia Philharmonic.
Look at piano lessons for 6th grader -- then look at jazz pianists jamming.
Is the measure of professional ballet dancing how fast you can dance? Well, yes and no.
Must a violinist play fast to earn money at it? Yes, and no.
What makes the difference between the amateur performer and the professional?
It's not the actual speed with which they do the performance but how fast they are able to understand instructions and produce what is required on the first try.
A professional actor comes onstage with a troupe from a High School, knows the whole play from having done it dozens of times, looks around the stage, sees the taped on marks for the actors, asks the director a few questions, listens carefully, then just does the performance -- with precision, effortlessly.
"Effortlessly" is the key -- as I learned from Robert Heinlein's characters, sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.
How do you get to where you can project the seemingly effortless performance of something which is inherently difficult? Repetition. Practice.
But what exactly do you practice and how? Does just doing it over and over produce that ability?
Think of the ballet mistress drilling a professional troupe. She walks among them as they do routine stretches and moves, jogs an elbow here, prods a knee there, lines them up, pokes a chin, scolds for a sour expression -- correcting and correcting their errors and never letting them practice an error, not by a fraction of an inch.
That's what editors do for writers.
It's feedback. Writers can't get it from readers because "the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote." Reading is a very personal experience, a creative experience, a unique experience. A good story can be reread many times, and become a classic down the generations, because if there are none of those "errors" the ballet mistress corrects, the performance is "effortless" and the reader can't see the writer at all.
Each time the reader reads that book, the book is different because the reader has changed.
The editor, on the other hand, is not reading subjectively but objectively. The editor's job is to judge the work by how well it conforms to its trope, to its genre signature.
See my series of 7 posts on editing. Here is #7 with links to the previous ones.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
Training in writing as a ballet dancer trains in ballet, or a violinist, pianist, actor, singer, football player or martial artist trains, will allow the writer to produce product at an optimum rate to allow the product to change with the reader.
The trick is to train under supervision, not just do the same thing doggedly over and over.
What Events like nanowrimo and the "games" suggested on the blog entry I found on twitter lack is that kind of feedback from supervision that a ballet mistress or voice coach provides, immediate correction, immediate discipline. The immediacy, the interruption of the move to reposition precisely, causes the training to be effective.
Haven't you wondered why working professional actors go to "voice lessons"? Surely after all these years, they don't need "lessons."
They aren't "lessons" -- nothing to learn. They are training, with instant correction of errors to prevent the ingraining of the error.
"But," you may be thinking, "there is no wrong way to write, no wrong way to tell a story!"
That's true. There is no wrong story, and no two writers achieve their end-product via the same path. In fact, any given writer will choose a different path for different works.
But just as music has a structure which is innate in the structure of the universe, so too fiction has a structure which is innate in the structure of the universe -- which is fine, because each human being is a unique bit of the structure of the universe (very possibly containing the whole universe, too).
Yes, Chinese musical scales differ (markedly) from European scales - mid-Eastern scales - etc. But each scale works in its own way from the mathematics behind sound.
Many musicians grow up playing and then composing music "by ear" -- having internalized the scale they're familiar with so they create with it. Many writers, likewise, fall right into storytelling effortlessly, by sheer talent. Emotion is to storytelling as sound is to music. There are 7 cardinal emotions behind the structure of fiction, just as there are 7 tones in an octave (two do's, different but the same). Some of us are born with a Talent for seeing those 7 emotions, others not. (this is a sub-set of the Chakras and we have to talk about Chakras and Cardinal Emotions together with how a writer can use language to stimulate the reader's Chakras, but that's a tiny bit off topic today.)
Other writers have to learn, and then train, to be able to produce their stories for a wide market. Even the talented have to train to make the top tier of worldclass performers in the scales of emotion.
So how do you train?
#1) you learn - you find out what you must do, get it into your head what the objective is.
You do that by reading blogs like this one, lots of books on writing, reading about writing, and then reading a whole lot from the field you want to write in and analyzing as I've shown you in previous blogs. And of course, you construct your business model.
#2) you practice - you train in your dojo every day, morning, noon, and night, and in between.
That means you write, just as a would-be violin soloist for a Philharmonic orchestra or a beginning opera star would practice. Six to eight hours a day, you practice.
And just what is the secret to practicing an instrument?
Tempo. That's it in a word, tempo.
First you go very slowly, striking each note with careful, precise deliberation. But not unevenly -- in tempo. The spaces between the notes, the silences, are as meaningful as the sound in forming the ultimate product, the song, the poetry of emotion. So you start by striking those notes.
In fact, you learn to touch-type and become speedy at it the same way. Careful, singular, deliberate strikes, one plodding strike at a time, but in the correct rhythm. Go slowly enough that you can do it accurately.
Once you have the basic process down, one note after another, you do it again and again, nice and even, but with a relentless BEAT -- you make a mistake, you don't stop, you just plonk right onwards. Next time through, you focus on that missed-spot and you hit it, staying in tempo. And then again, and again, until you get it right. If you stop every time you make a mistake, you learn to make a mistake right there and stop. It ruins the performance. So you play through the mistake, and plod on.
If you try the nanowrimo too soon in your mastery, you'll fail because you aren't ready for full speed. It's just like martial arts training - you get fast by going slow.
Gradually, you pick up the tempo, but not so much that the speed makes you make mistakes. And you do it at that speed until you don't make mistakes. Then you pick up the tempo, and do it again and again. Then faster.
Once you've learned a number of songs that way, you begin to find that the next one you learn is easier to learn.
Now a "song" in music is like a "genre" in fiction -- a song, a piece, a symphony, a quartet, and so on -- each has a structure, a protocol, an appeal based on expectations. In dance, choreography has "composition" -- (competitive figure skating too) -- each type of artform has its "rules" comprised of the elements that have been successful with large audiences.
Becoming a professional writer is just like becoming a professional musician able to play "requests" at a party, or an audition for a movie, or to be in the orchestra at a circus performance. Yes it takes practice, but you must not practice your mistakes. Speed is not the objective. Just because you can play it fast doesn't mean you played it well. The "speed" the professional has that the amateur doesn't have lies in the ability to do new things as easily and proficiently as doing old things.
That "speed" comes from spending one's whole work-day on just this one skill, acquiring, practicing UNDER SUPERVISION so errors get corrected before they get ingrained, teaching, and performing -- a whole life focused on this one skill.
That's why you must get paid for your work -- because there's no time to do anything else, no strength or attention.
To get paid, you don't write a certain quota of words per day, you write the appropriate amount at the appropriate tempo for this performance. Professionalism allows you to judge what is "appropriate" in each instance and be right -- because your very life depends on that judgement. If you're wrong, you don't get paid and can't buy food.
Trust me, money sharpens the judgement remarkably.
Look at the career of Johnston McCulley -- historical yes, and in an era with a slightly different business model than we can use today -- but well worth learning from:
----------FROM "Tales of Thubway Tham" Wildside Press 2011 on Kindle ----------
Johnston McCulley will be forever famous as the creator of Zorro, the Robin Hood-like hero of old California. But few realize how truly prolific and creative McCulley was throughout his long career as a writer. McCulley (1883-1958) made first true specialist in pulp-fiction periodical, Detective Story Magazine, a special home for his work. In its pages he launched series after series . . . The Avenging Twins (who appeared in a series of eight adventures between 1923 and1926), the Black Star (fourteen stories from 1916-1930), The Crimson Clown (seventeen stories from 1926-1931), The Man in Purple (three stories in 1921), The Spider (eleven stories between1918 and 1919), Terry Trimble (four stories between 1917 and 1919), The Thunderbolt (three stories between 1920 and 1921) but most especially Thubway Tham (who appeared in more than one hundred and eighty stories between 1916 and 1948, at first in Detective Story Magazine, but later in such places as Thrilling Detective, with later reprints in The Saint Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and others). The Thubway Tham series, you will note,starts before and lasts longer than all of McCulley’s other mystery series combined! Clearly Tham was a favorite character, one to whom the author returned time and again.
Thubway Tham is a small, short-tempered gnome of a man, a professional pickpocket with an annoying lisp. But he is no mere thief . . . he is the king of his chosen profession, a master “dip” who works only in the subways of New York City. Like all such villains, he faces a cunning adversary in Police Detective Craddock, who is always half a pace behind. Craddock has sworn to put Tham behind bars, where he belongs. But Tham is clever enough to always remain one step ahead of Craddock and everyone else.
Johnston McCulley; John Betancourt. Tales of Thubway Tham (Kindle Locations 48-50).
------------------------
There are echoes of the pulp era business model with the advent of e-publishing, Indie publishers and self publishing. The similarities may far outweigh the differences, so study the careers of famous writers of that era for how they learned and honed their craft.
Nanowrimo is trying to simulate that pulp era honing, and may just be the tonic you need to get you going and keep you going. But remember the ballet mistress training already famous professional ballerinas, pounding her cane and shouting ONE-TWO-THREE-ELBOWS OUT CHIN IN - FOUR FIVE!
Improv has a lot to be said for it, but as with acting, it's more a matter of with whom you improv than what you improv.
If you can find an elderly Johnston McCulley to watch you write, smack your jutting elbows and elevate your chin and remind you to smile while you type, you may find these online exposures to writing/pacing well worth while.
Just remember success isn't counted by a certain number of words per day but by the appropriate number of words per project.
You want to earn the title true specialist in the e-book world? Practice, practice, practice performing your art.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Measuring of success at writing as a number of words has two sides to it:
a) many markets do pay by the "word" so the faster you produce the more money you make. Words/day = $/day = professionalism
b) but novel markets don't pay by the word but by the well turned, completed, plot with all supports in place to make it fun to read without much editing.
And then there's the non-fiction markets. Newspapers, print and online, pay by the article -- with a total subject covered within a specified number of words, K bytes, or space (lines, whatever).
Good writing is not measured by the number of words you produce -- if it were, then only short words would be professional. (one could argue that's the trend!)
However, there is something to be said for professionalism being measured in SPEED of production.
This measure is entirely market driven. Novels usually produce an advance against royalties and after the book has earned the advance, the author gets a little bit each time a copy sells. But that business model is dying very quickly.
The e-book market pays no advance, but a bigger royalty per copy sold. And books don't go out of print in a couple of weeks.
The e-author's business model then is not to write quickly, but to write something that will be talked about, tweeted about, commented on, and recommended on goodreads etc. The author's objective under the new business model must be to write solidly.
But there are bills to pay now. You can't mount a social media campaign if you can't pay your internet connection bill. So you must produce quickly, but also solidly.
This is a dilemma brought to my attention by the following tweet.
---------
SheviStories 11:44am via Tweet Button
Improv for Writers, Part 3: Speed Writer--learn to write FAST! shevi.blogspot.com/2011/11/improv… #litchat #kidlitchat #YALitChat #WritersRoad #NaNoWriMo
----------------------
Improv and Nanowrimo have something in common - training.
I've made this point many times in this blog - you don't "learn" to write, you "train" to write.
As I was taught when I was in elementary school, by the professional writer, Alma Hill, "Writing is a performing art."
This is also true of journalism where one must go out, get the story, come back and type it up for publication within the hour. The words have to be there, making sense, covering the entire topic with all the facts straight, and most of the spelling correct.
There's a college degree in journalism that gets you started, but nothing except practice actually brings that skill online for you.
And the same is true of fiction writing. Fiction is a performing art. Fiction writing is brought to professional levels and standards only by practice against a clock, against a deadline, or in competition.
That's the good thing in the nanowrimo exercise. Many people need "pressure" in an open forum, a classroom atmosphere, a newspaper's bullpen, or a filmmaker's pitch session to perfect these skills. Others master the skill set faster in private, and alone.
Most fiction-writer personalities actually do better in solitude -- at least up to a point.
So we are seeing a variety of these online open, public forum exercise halls appearing where creative people practice their skills. This crop of online trained writers will be the top tier of the profession within then next 20 years or so, the core of their career building years.
But the participants in such open exercises where they obsesses on words-by-the-day output as being "writers" will also be the occupants of the bottom tier of always-rejected writers. Those will be the folks who practiced their errors until their brains had literally incorporated the errors into their synapses and no further lessons can fix their errors.
Since the measure of professional success is $$$ income, which is caused by words-by-the-day output goals being met, and all the books on writing craft come to the same bottom line -- a million words for the garbage can before you produce anything worth selling -- how do you avoid ingraining errors?
I've seen careers go both ways -- each successive published novel a vast improvement over the last, or each successive novel repeating the same errors.
What can a beginning writer learn that can prevent that from happening to them?
That may be the wrong question. Let's phrase it another way.
Where can a beginning writer find out how to write fast? And just how fast is the right speed?
Back to the model of writing that Alma Hill taught me. Writing is a performing art. So look to the training processes in performing arts to find the best model for mastering novel writing at the professional level.
Look at the training of little girls in ballet class -- then look at a Master Class at the New York Ballet.
Look at a little boy's first violin lessons -- then look at the "lessons" taken by a member of the Philadelphia Philharmonic.
Look at piano lessons for 6th grader -- then look at jazz pianists jamming.
Is the measure of professional ballet dancing how fast you can dance? Well, yes and no.
Must a violinist play fast to earn money at it? Yes, and no.
What makes the difference between the amateur performer and the professional?
It's not the actual speed with which they do the performance but how fast they are able to understand instructions and produce what is required on the first try.
A professional actor comes onstage with a troupe from a High School, knows the whole play from having done it dozens of times, looks around the stage, sees the taped on marks for the actors, asks the director a few questions, listens carefully, then just does the performance -- with precision, effortlessly.
"Effortlessly" is the key -- as I learned from Robert Heinlein's characters, sounding spontaneous is a matter of careful preparation.
How do you get to where you can project the seemingly effortless performance of something which is inherently difficult? Repetition. Practice.
But what exactly do you practice and how? Does just doing it over and over produce that ability?
Think of the ballet mistress drilling a professional troupe. She walks among them as they do routine stretches and moves, jogs an elbow here, prods a knee there, lines them up, pokes a chin, scolds for a sour expression -- correcting and correcting their errors and never letting them practice an error, not by a fraction of an inch.
That's what editors do for writers.
It's feedback. Writers can't get it from readers because "the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote." Reading is a very personal experience, a creative experience, a unique experience. A good story can be reread many times, and become a classic down the generations, because if there are none of those "errors" the ballet mistress corrects, the performance is "effortless" and the reader can't see the writer at all.
Each time the reader reads that book, the book is different because the reader has changed.
The editor, on the other hand, is not reading subjectively but objectively. The editor's job is to judge the work by how well it conforms to its trope, to its genre signature.
See my series of 7 posts on editing. Here is #7 with links to the previous ones.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
Training in writing as a ballet dancer trains in ballet, or a violinist, pianist, actor, singer, football player or martial artist trains, will allow the writer to produce product at an optimum rate to allow the product to change with the reader.
The trick is to train under supervision, not just do the same thing doggedly over and over.
What Events like nanowrimo and the "games" suggested on the blog entry I found on twitter lack is that kind of feedback from supervision that a ballet mistress or voice coach provides, immediate correction, immediate discipline. The immediacy, the interruption of the move to reposition precisely, causes the training to be effective.
Haven't you wondered why working professional actors go to "voice lessons"? Surely after all these years, they don't need "lessons."
They aren't "lessons" -- nothing to learn. They are training, with instant correction of errors to prevent the ingraining of the error.
"But," you may be thinking, "there is no wrong way to write, no wrong way to tell a story!"
That's true. There is no wrong story, and no two writers achieve their end-product via the same path. In fact, any given writer will choose a different path for different works.
But just as music has a structure which is innate in the structure of the universe, so too fiction has a structure which is innate in the structure of the universe -- which is fine, because each human being is a unique bit of the structure of the universe (very possibly containing the whole universe, too).
Yes, Chinese musical scales differ (markedly) from European scales - mid-Eastern scales - etc. But each scale works in its own way from the mathematics behind sound.
Many musicians grow up playing and then composing music "by ear" -- having internalized the scale they're familiar with so they create with it. Many writers, likewise, fall right into storytelling effortlessly, by sheer talent. Emotion is to storytelling as sound is to music. There are 7 cardinal emotions behind the structure of fiction, just as there are 7 tones in an octave (two do's, different but the same). Some of us are born with a Talent for seeing those 7 emotions, others not. (this is a sub-set of the Chakras and we have to talk about Chakras and Cardinal Emotions together with how a writer can use language to stimulate the reader's Chakras, but that's a tiny bit off topic today.)
Other writers have to learn, and then train, to be able to produce their stories for a wide market. Even the talented have to train to make the top tier of worldclass performers in the scales of emotion.
So how do you train?
#1) you learn - you find out what you must do, get it into your head what the objective is.
You do that by reading blogs like this one, lots of books on writing, reading about writing, and then reading a whole lot from the field you want to write in and analyzing as I've shown you in previous blogs. And of course, you construct your business model.
#2) you practice - you train in your dojo every day, morning, noon, and night, and in between.
That means you write, just as a would-be violin soloist for a Philharmonic orchestra or a beginning opera star would practice. Six to eight hours a day, you practice.
And just what is the secret to practicing an instrument?
Tempo. That's it in a word, tempo.
First you go very slowly, striking each note with careful, precise deliberation. But not unevenly -- in tempo. The spaces between the notes, the silences, are as meaningful as the sound in forming the ultimate product, the song, the poetry of emotion. So you start by striking those notes.
In fact, you learn to touch-type and become speedy at it the same way. Careful, singular, deliberate strikes, one plodding strike at a time, but in the correct rhythm. Go slowly enough that you can do it accurately.
Once you have the basic process down, one note after another, you do it again and again, nice and even, but with a relentless BEAT -- you make a mistake, you don't stop, you just plonk right onwards. Next time through, you focus on that missed-spot and you hit it, staying in tempo. And then again, and again, until you get it right. If you stop every time you make a mistake, you learn to make a mistake right there and stop. It ruins the performance. So you play through the mistake, and plod on.
If you try the nanowrimo too soon in your mastery, you'll fail because you aren't ready for full speed. It's just like martial arts training - you get fast by going slow.
Gradually, you pick up the tempo, but not so much that the speed makes you make mistakes. And you do it at that speed until you don't make mistakes. Then you pick up the tempo, and do it again and again. Then faster.
Once you've learned a number of songs that way, you begin to find that the next one you learn is easier to learn.
Now a "song" in music is like a "genre" in fiction -- a song, a piece, a symphony, a quartet, and so on -- each has a structure, a protocol, an appeal based on expectations. In dance, choreography has "composition" -- (competitive figure skating too) -- each type of artform has its "rules" comprised of the elements that have been successful with large audiences.
Becoming a professional writer is just like becoming a professional musician able to play "requests" at a party, or an audition for a movie, or to be in the orchestra at a circus performance. Yes it takes practice, but you must not practice your mistakes. Speed is not the objective. Just because you can play it fast doesn't mean you played it well. The "speed" the professional has that the amateur doesn't have lies in the ability to do new things as easily and proficiently as doing old things.
That "speed" comes from spending one's whole work-day on just this one skill, acquiring, practicing UNDER SUPERVISION so errors get corrected before they get ingrained, teaching, and performing -- a whole life focused on this one skill.
That's why you must get paid for your work -- because there's no time to do anything else, no strength or attention.
To get paid, you don't write a certain quota of words per day, you write the appropriate amount at the appropriate tempo for this performance. Professionalism allows you to judge what is "appropriate" in each instance and be right -- because your very life depends on that judgement. If you're wrong, you don't get paid and can't buy food.
Trust me, money sharpens the judgement remarkably.
Look at the career of Johnston McCulley -- historical yes, and in an era with a slightly different business model than we can use today -- but well worth learning from:
----------FROM "Tales of Thubway Tham" Wildside Press 2011 on Kindle ----------
Johnston McCulley will be forever famous as the creator of Zorro, the Robin Hood-like hero of old California. But few realize how truly prolific and creative McCulley was throughout his long career as a writer. McCulley (1883-1958) made first true specialist in pulp-fiction periodical, Detective Story Magazine, a special home for his work. In its pages he launched series after series . . . The Avenging Twins (who appeared in a series of eight adventures between 1923 and1926), the Black Star (fourteen stories from 1916-1930), The Crimson Clown (seventeen stories from 1926-1931), The Man in Purple (three stories in 1921), The Spider (eleven stories between1918 and 1919), Terry Trimble (four stories between 1917 and 1919), The Thunderbolt (three stories between 1920 and 1921) but most especially Thubway Tham (who appeared in more than one hundred and eighty stories between 1916 and 1948, at first in Detective Story Magazine, but later in such places as Thrilling Detective, with later reprints in The Saint Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and others). The Thubway Tham series, you will note,starts before and lasts longer than all of McCulley’s other mystery series combined! Clearly Tham was a favorite character, one to whom the author returned time and again.
Thubway Tham is a small, short-tempered gnome of a man, a professional pickpocket with an annoying lisp. But he is no mere thief . . . he is the king of his chosen profession, a master “dip” who works only in the subways of New York City. Like all such villains, he faces a cunning adversary in Police Detective Craddock, who is always half a pace behind. Craddock has sworn to put Tham behind bars, where he belongs. But Tham is clever enough to always remain one step ahead of Craddock and everyone else.
Johnston McCulley; John Betancourt. Tales of Thubway Tham (Kindle Locations 48-50).
------------------------
There are echoes of the pulp era business model with the advent of e-publishing, Indie publishers and self publishing. The similarities may far outweigh the differences, so study the careers of famous writers of that era for how they learned and honed their craft.
Nanowrimo is trying to simulate that pulp era honing, and may just be the tonic you need to get you going and keep you going. But remember the ballet mistress training already famous professional ballerinas, pounding her cane and shouting ONE-TWO-THREE-ELBOWS OUT CHIN IN - FOUR FIVE!
Improv has a lot to be said for it, but as with acting, it's more a matter of with whom you improv than what you improv.
If you can find an elderly Johnston McCulley to watch you write, smack your jutting elbows and elevate your chin and remind you to smile while you type, you may find these online exposures to writing/pacing well worth while.
Just remember success isn't counted by a certain number of words per day but by the appropriate number of words per project.
You want to earn the title true specialist in the e-book world? Practice, practice, practice performing your art.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Shifting Poles and Toilet Water Swirl
There may or may not be a connection. Have you ever googled "direction of swirl in toilet"? (Before you get to the "toilet", Google will offer you the option of the bathtub, instead. But that is beside the point.)
According to Wikipedia "It is a commonly held misconception that when flushed, the water in a toilet bowl swirls one way if the toilet is north of the equator and the other way if south of the equator, due to the Coriolis effect – usually, counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. In reality, the direction that the water takes is much more determined by the direction that the bowl's rim jets are pointed, and it can be made to flush in either direction in either hemisphere by simply redirecting the rim jets during manufacture. On the scale of bathtubs and toilets, the Coriolis effect is too weak to be observed except under laboratory conditions"
Scrupulous attribution in accordance with Wiki's Creative Commons policies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#Swirl_direction
So.... if you have not redirected your rim jets recently, and your waste water swirls in the "wrong" direction, there could be a mega tsunami in your future.
Not out of the toilet! I'm talking about a global disaster. As it probably would be a dis-aster.... not "aster" as in star, more likely as in "slow moving asteroid". On the other hand, our Sun is a star, and it was the cause of the trouble in 2012 (the movie).
http://paranormal.about.com/od/earthchanges/a/pole-shift.htm
Okay. All this reminds me of one of Professor Trelawney's tea leaf reading (Tessomancy) scenes. (As an author of alien romance, I also enjoy fantasy, and science fiction.) Am I going to believe that we are in the slow midst of a magnetic pole shift, if the toilet does not have a good, vigorous swirl in either direction?
http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/plumbing/toilet-swirl-but-no-vortex-265131.html
No. But, if you are excessively prudent, you might enjoy this blog, which suggests where to go househunting in the next nine months.
http://blog.2012pro.com/2012/how-to-survive-polar-shift-at-dec-2012-safe-zones-of-our-planet-%E2%80%93-united-states
Nowhere in the USA is a particularly good spot. Nor is Europe. Which brings me to the science fiction movie 2012, which poetically put mankind back in --or, more properly, on-- Africa.
I just had a thought, "if tessomancy is tea leaf reading what is toilet bowl reading?" (For the very limited purpose of prognosticating the end of the world as we know it.) Google hasn't thought of answering that, so I guess I can please myself.
Latrinomancy? But, the Romans did not enjoy a view of a vortex.
So perhaps Ajaxomancy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet
"1596: Sir John Harington (born 1561) published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, describing a forerunner to the modern flush toilet installed at his house at Kelston.[7] The design had a flush valve to let water out of the tank, and a wash-down design to empty the bowl. He installed one for his godmother Elizabeth I of England at Richmond Palace, although she refused to use it because it made too much noise.[citation needed] The Ajax was not taken up on a wide scale in England, but was adopted in France under the name Angrez."
This week, I watched 2012. I watched it as research for a Crazy Tuesday On Saturday radio interview (I am the host) with author Robert P Bennett, about his Blind Traveler mystery series which takes place in 2021 when natural forces have changed the world, the poles have shifted, pressure is building, and earthquakes wreak havoc.... and a blind computer technologist solves murders using his other senses.
No, we did not talk about toilets. We talked about disability; about Chicago as a wonderful holiday destination for a geek or an agricultural pathologist; about turtles; and about shifting pole theory; and also about the things people do that piss off a person in a wheelchair, and how blind men (and women) might get around using GPS and virtual reality.
I was going to scour the bottom of the metaphorical barrel for a pithy last line, but instead, please check out curmudgeonly remarks about teachers who apparently never flush the toilet or wash their hands on "bad Coriolis". http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
According to Wikipedia "It is a commonly held misconception that when flushed, the water in a toilet bowl swirls one way if the toilet is north of the equator and the other way if south of the equator, due to the Coriolis effect – usually, counter clockwise in the northern hemisphere, and clockwise in the southern hemisphere. In reality, the direction that the water takes is much more determined by the direction that the bowl's rim jets are pointed, and it can be made to flush in either direction in either hemisphere by simply redirecting the rim jets during manufacture. On the scale of bathtubs and toilets, the Coriolis effect is too weak to be observed except under laboratory conditions"
Scrupulous attribution in accordance with Wiki's Creative Commons policies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet#Swirl_direction
So.... if you have not redirected your rim jets recently, and your waste water swirls in the "wrong" direction, there could be a mega tsunami in your future.
Not out of the toilet! I'm talking about a global disaster. As it probably would be a dis-aster.... not "aster" as in star, more likely as in "slow moving asteroid". On the other hand, our Sun is a star, and it was the cause of the trouble in 2012 (the movie).
http://paranormal.about.com/od/earthchanges/a/pole-shift.htm
- A geological or axial shift in which the Earth's crust literally slips around its molten core - like a loose peel on an orange - altering the positions of land masses with respect to the planet's rotation on its axis. This could happen by a few degrees or by many degrees. Antarctica could wind up at the equator and Miami could be the new North Pole. The effects on our civilization could be devastating.
- A shift of the magnetic poles only. As it is, the Earth's magnetic north (the north that compasses point to) is not exactly the same as the true North Pole. This magnetic pole is not fixed and can move. In fact, scientists are fairly certain that it has shifted by as much as 180 degrees several times in the past. This change may be sudden or it may be gradual, taking place over hundreds or even thousands of years. The effects on life on the planet would probably be minimal, affecting perhaps the migratory or homing instincts of some animals.
Okay. All this reminds me of one of Professor Trelawney's tea leaf reading (Tessomancy) scenes. (As an author of alien romance, I also enjoy fantasy, and science fiction.) Am I going to believe that we are in the slow midst of a magnetic pole shift, if the toilet does not have a good, vigorous swirl in either direction?
http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/plumbing/toilet-swirl-but-no-vortex-265131.html
No. But, if you are excessively prudent, you might enjoy this blog, which suggests where to go househunting in the next nine months.
http://blog.2012pro.com/2012/how-to-survive-polar-shift-at-dec-2012-safe-zones-of-our-planet-%E2%80%93-united-states
Nowhere in the USA is a particularly good spot. Nor is Europe. Which brings me to the science fiction movie 2012, which poetically put mankind back in --or, more properly, on-- Africa.
I just had a thought, "if tessomancy is tea leaf reading what is toilet bowl reading?" (For the very limited purpose of prognosticating the end of the world as we know it.) Google hasn't thought of answering that, so I guess I can please myself.
Latrinomancy? But, the Romans did not enjoy a view of a vortex.
So perhaps Ajaxomancy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet
"1596: Sir John Harington (born 1561) published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, describing a forerunner to the modern flush toilet installed at his house at Kelston.[7] The design had a flush valve to let water out of the tank, and a wash-down design to empty the bowl. He installed one for his godmother Elizabeth I of England at Richmond Palace, although she refused to use it because it made too much noise.[citation needed] The Ajax was not taken up on a wide scale in England, but was adopted in France under the name Angrez."
This week, I watched 2012. I watched it as research for a Crazy Tuesday On Saturday radio interview (I am the host) with author Robert P Bennett, about his Blind Traveler mystery series which takes place in 2021 when natural forces have changed the world, the poles have shifted, pressure is building, and earthquakes wreak havoc.... and a blind computer technologist solves murders using his other senses.
No, we did not talk about toilets. We talked about disability; about Chicago as a wonderful holiday destination for a geek or an agricultural pathologist; about turtles; and about shifting pole theory; and also about the things people do that piss off a person in a wheelchair, and how blind men (and women) might get around using GPS and virtual reality.
I was going to scour the bottom of the metaphorical barrel for a pithy last line, but instead, please check out curmudgeonly remarks about teachers who apparently never flush the toilet or wash their hands on "bad Coriolis". http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Microscopic Mind Control
A scientist theorizes about the effects of toxoplasmosis, often transmitted by domestic cats, on the brains of infected people:
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
This organism is far from the only parasite that changes the behavior of its host. Parasites that cause their hosts to behave in ways that make them more likely to be eaten by predators (which then spread the infection) are well known. It seems creepier in the context of human brain function and behavior, though.
An infection that makes the victim more receptive to bonding with cats? Explains a lot, doesn't it?
If we have to be covertly manipulated by other animals, I'd rather have feline overlords than secret vampiric lizard masters, anyway.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
This organism is far from the only parasite that changes the behavior of its host. Parasites that cause their hosts to behave in ways that make them more likely to be eaten by predators (which then spread the infection) are well known. It seems creepier in the context of human brain function and behavior, though.
An infection that makes the victim more receptive to bonding with cats? Explains a lot, doesn't it?
If we have to be covertly manipulated by other animals, I'd rather have feline overlords than secret vampiric lizard masters, anyway.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
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