Monday, February 14, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
The E-Book Royalty Mess (courtesy of Authors' Guild)
As I read this, I felt it was really important to share... and permission is granted... because I see a lot of misunderstanding by members of the public about e-books and what "sharing" does to authors.
Does it make a difference, if people know that many authors are being shafted at both ends of the business?
Does it make a difference, if people know that many authors are being shafted at both ends of the business?
The E-Book Royalty Mess: An Interim Fix
February 11, 2011. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Great Blackout, Amazon's weeklong shut down of e-commerce for nearly all of Macmillan's titles, we're sending out a series of alerts on the state of e-books, authorship, and publishing. The first installment ("How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble. Probably.") discussed the outcome, of that battle, which introduced a modicum of competition into the distribution of e-books. The second, ("E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins") took up the long-simmering e-royalty debate, and showed that publishers generally do significantly better on e-book sales than on hardcover sales, while authors always do worse.
Today, we look at the implications of that disparity, and suggest an interim solution to minimize the harm to authors.
Negotiating a publishing contract is frequently contentious, but authors have long been able to take comfort in this: once the contract is signed, the interests of the author and the publisher are largely aligned. If the publisher works to maximize its revenues, it will necessarily work to maximize the author's royalties. This is the heart of the traditional bargain, whereby the author licenses the publisher long-term, exclusive book rights in the world's largest book market in exchange for an advance and the promise of diligently working to the joint benefit of author and publisher.
Now, for the first time, publishers have strong incentives to work against the author's interests.
As we discussed in our last alert, authors and publishers have traditionally acted as equal partners, splitting the net proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a fifty-fifty split of proceeds, and the standard hardcover trade book royalty -- 15% of the retail price -- represented half of the net proceeds from selling the book when the standard was established.* But trade book publishers currently offer e-book royalties at precisely half what the terms of a traditional proceeds-sharing arrangement would dictate -- paying just 25% of net income on e-book sales. That's why the shift from hardcover to e-book sales is a win for publishers, a loss for authors.
The Pushback
The publisher's standard reply to this -- which we heard yet again after last week's alert -- is a muddle, conflating fixed costs with variable costs. Let's address that before we move on.
For any book, a publisher has two types of fixed costs: those attributable to the publisher's operations as a whole (office overhead, investments in infrastructure, etc.) and those attributable to the particular work (author's advance, editing, design). The variable costs for the book are the unit costs of production. These costs (print, paper, binding, returns, royalty) tell a publisher how much more it costs to get, say, 10,000 additional hardcover books to stores and sell them. The publisher's gross profit per unit (unit income minus unit costs) is the amount against which the author's royalties are traditionally and properly measured. With this sort of analysis, a publisher can compare the gross profitability per unit of, for example, a hardcover to a trade paperback edition.
Investments in technology change nothing. Publishers never argued, for example, that hardcover royalties needed to be cut when they began equipping their editorial and design staffs with expensive (at the time) personal computers, buying pricey computers and software for their designers, tying those computers together with ever-more-powerful Ethernet cables and routers, and hiring support staff to maintain it all. Publishers simply took their share of the gross profits from book sales and applied it to all of their costs, as they always have. What remains after deducting those costs is deemed the publisher's net profit. Similarly, authors take their share of the proceeds of their book sales and apply it to their overhead (food, clothing, shelter, and computer technology) and costs (their labor and out-of-pocket costs to write the manuscript). What remains is the author's net profit.
The proper question is this: how much better off is a publisher if it sells a book, print or digital, than it is if it doesn't? That is what we measured. We then compared that to the author's print and digital royalties per book.
Publisher's E-Gains + Author's E-Losses = E-Bias
Applying standard trade hardcover and e-book terms to Kathryn Stockett's "The Help," David Baldacci's "Hell's Corner," and Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken," we found that publishers do far better by selling e-books than hardcovers (realizing "e-gains" of 27% to 77%), while the authors do much worse (suffering "e-losses" of 17% to 39%). Publishers can't help being influenced by the gains; e-bias will inevitably drive their decisions.
Some simplified examples show how e-bias plays out in publishing decisions:
1. Promotional Bias. Assume a publisher is contemplating whether to invest a portion of a book's limited marketing budget in stimulating the sale of digital books (paying for featured placement in the Kindle or Nook stores, perhaps) or in encouraging print sales through a promotion at physical bookstores. Either way, the publisher expects the investment to boost sales by 1,000 copies. A sensible publisher would spend the money to promote digital books, pocketing an additional $1,570 to $4,170 on those sales compared to hardcover sales. Such a decision, however, would cost Ms. Stockett, Mr. Baldacci, and Ms. Hillenbrand $1,470, $1,570, and $670, respectively, in royalties.
2. Print-Run Bias. E-gains of 27% to 77% become irresistible when a publisher looks at risk-adjusted returns on investment, as any businessperson would. Once a book is typeset for print, the publisher must invest an additional $30,000 to have 10,000 hardcover books ready for sale, using the figures from our prior alert. Once the digital template is created and distributed to the major vendors, on the other hand, there is no additional cost to having the book ready for purchase by an unlimited number of customers. Even the encryption fee (50 cents per book, at most) isn't incurred until the reader purchases the book. In this environment a publisher is nearly certain to keep print runs as short as possible, risking unavailability at bookstores, in order to decrease overall risk and maximize the publisher's return on investment.
Publishers, in short, will work to increase e-book sales at the inevitable expense of hardcover sales, tilting more and more purchases toward e-books, and their lower royalties. Publishers, as sensible, profit-maximizing entities, will work against their authors' best interests.
An Interim Solution: Negotiate an E-Royalty Floor
This won't go on forever. Bargain basement e-royalty rates are largely a result of negotiating indifference. The current industry standards for e-royalties began to gel a decade or so ago, when there was no e-book market to speak of. Authors and agents weren't willing to walk away from publishing contracts over a royalty clause that had little effect on the author's earnings.
Once the digital market gets large enough, authors with strong sales records won't put up with this: they'll go where they'll once again be paid as full partners in the exploitation of their creative work. That day is fast approaching, and would probably be here already, were it not for a tripwire in the contracts of thousands of in-print books. That tripwire? If the publisher increases its e-royalty rates for a new book, the e-royalty rates of countless in-print books from that publisher will automatically match the new rate or be subject to renegotiation.
So, what's to be done in the meantime? Here's a solution that won't cascade through countless backlist books: soften the e-bias by eliminating the author's e-loss. That is, negotiate for an e-royalty floor tied to the prevailing print book royalty amount.
Turning again to our last alert for examples, here are the calculations of e-losses and e-gains without an e-royalty floor:
"The Help," by Kathryn Stockett
Author's Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book.
Author's E-Loss = -39%
Publisher's Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book.
Publisher's E-Gain = +33%
"Hell's Corner," by David Baldacci
Author's Standard Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $2.63 e-book.
Author's E-Loss = -37%
Publisher's Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $7.37 e-book.
Publisher's E-Gain = +27%
"Unbroken," by Laura Hillenbrand
Author's Standard Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $3.38 e-book.
Author's E-Loss = -17%
Publisher's Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $9.62 e-book.
Publisher's E-Gain = +77%
Here are the calculations with an e-royalty floor:
"The Help," by Kathryn Stockett
Author's Adjusted Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $3.75 e-book.
Author's E-Loss = Zero
Publisher's Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $4.85 e-book.
Publisher's E-Gain = +2%
"Hell's Corner," by David Baldacci
Author's Adjusted Royalty: $4.20 hardcover; $4.20 e-book.
Author's E-Loss = Zero
Publisher's Margin: $5.80 hardcover; $5.80 e-book.
Publisher's E-Gain = Zero
"Unbroken," by Laura Hillenbrand
Author's Adjusted Royalty: $4.05 hardcover; $4.05 e-book.
Author's E-Loss = Zero
Publisher's Margin: $5.45 hardcover; $8.85 e-book.
Publisher's E-Gain = +62%
While this wouldn't restore authors to full partnership status in the sale of their work, it would prevent them from being harmed as publishers try to maximize their revenues. This is only an interim solution, however. In the long run, authors will demand to be restored to full partnership, and someone will give them that status.
Part 4 of this series will look at online piracy and book publishing.
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*A traditional industry rule of thumb was that the price of a hardcover should be five or six times the cost of production. (John P. Dessauer, Book Publishing: What It Is, What It Does. R.R. Bowker 1974, p. 92). To keep the math simple, let's assume that it's priced at five times the cost of production, that there are no returns, and that the bookseller pays the publisher 50% of the list price for the book. Of the 50% the publisher receives, subtract 20% for the cost of production (one-fifth the retail price) and the net proceeds are 30% of the retail list price. Split that in two, and one arrives at the author's standard hardcover royalty, 15% of the retail list price. (A current rule of thumb is that the cost of producing a hardcover is about 15% of the retail price, but the actual costs vary widely.)
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Feel free to forward, post, or tweet. Here is a short URL for linking: http://tiny.cc/0p0jb
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Living in the Future
You've probably heard about the video clip of the hosts of NBC's TODAY show, in January 1994, trying to figure out what this new thing called the "Internet" is. Here's an article on that topic by columnist Leonard Pitts:
Leonard Pitts
Pitts contrasts the rate of change in the present day with that of the nineteenth century by imagining the reaction of a person who went to sleep in 1850 and woke in 1900. He'd notice lots of exciting new technology, but the world wouldn't look unrecognizable. But suppose someone fell asleep in 1961 and awoke today. The difference would be orders of magnitude greater. The columnist's point: "We are experiencing greater change at a faster pace than ever before."
FUTURE SHOCK predicted something of this phenomenon, of course. Now we're living it. Pitts suggests that the only reason we don't notice is the "fish in water" syndrome; it's all around us, and we flow with it. I'm reminded of an ANALOG article I read years ago, when e-mail was still relatively new. (I can't find the paper copy I thought I had, and I don't have any useful keywords to search with; if there's an archive of old ANALOG editorials, I can't find it.) The author wrote a letter that might be sent by a contemporary woman to her parents, substituting a nonsense word for every term that would have been unknown in (I think) 1900. E.g., the sentence "When are you going to get e-mail?" replaced "e-mail" with a bit of gibberish. The result sounded like an epistle from an alien planet. The author pointed out, also, that many of the words and phrases he left alone would have been unintelligible to the people of 1900 because they were used in novel ways, e.g. "answering machine." Not to mention the strangeness, to the 1900 reader, of such things as knowing the sex of an unborn baby.
We'd hope fans of science fiction would be less unsettled by the accelerating rate of change than the general public. As Asimov mentions somewhere, "escapist" SF writers and fans were concerned about such matters as overpopulation, environmental disasters, and nuclear war long before the average person noticed those potential problems. What do you think? Does being an SF reader help one adjust to the onrushing future? Now that SF has a higher profile among the mass audience, especially SF in visual media, would most people be more adaptable to a high rate of technological and social change than earlier generations were?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Leonard Pitts
Pitts contrasts the rate of change in the present day with that of the nineteenth century by imagining the reaction of a person who went to sleep in 1850 and woke in 1900. He'd notice lots of exciting new technology, but the world wouldn't look unrecognizable. But suppose someone fell asleep in 1961 and awoke today. The difference would be orders of magnitude greater. The columnist's point: "We are experiencing greater change at a faster pace than ever before."
FUTURE SHOCK predicted something of this phenomenon, of course. Now we're living it. Pitts suggests that the only reason we don't notice is the "fish in water" syndrome; it's all around us, and we flow with it. I'm reminded of an ANALOG article I read years ago, when e-mail was still relatively new. (I can't find the paper copy I thought I had, and I don't have any useful keywords to search with; if there's an archive of old ANALOG editorials, I can't find it.) The author wrote a letter that might be sent by a contemporary woman to her parents, substituting a nonsense word for every term that would have been unknown in (I think) 1900. E.g., the sentence "When are you going to get e-mail?" replaced "e-mail" with a bit of gibberish. The result sounded like an epistle from an alien planet. The author pointed out, also, that many of the words and phrases he left alone would have been unintelligible to the people of 1900 because they were used in novel ways, e.g. "answering machine." Not to mention the strangeness, to the 1900 reader, of such things as knowing the sex of an unborn baby.
We'd hope fans of science fiction would be less unsettled by the accelerating rate of change than the general public. As Asimov mentions somewhere, "escapist" SF writers and fans were concerned about such matters as overpopulation, environmental disasters, and nuclear war long before the average person noticed those potential problems. What do you think? Does being an SF reader help one adjust to the onrushing future? Now that SF has a higher profile among the mass audience, especially SF in visual media, would most people be more adaptable to a high rate of technological and social change than earlier generations were?
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
Vampchix and Worldcon in Reno
Now there's a combination of topics, but it'll make sense in a moment.
On the day after New Year's 2011, Michele Hauf invited me to do a guest post at her bog VampChix - which is about what it says it's about.
Of course I said yes without thinking -- after all, Vampires are my beat. You see a lot of familiar names over at Vampchix.blogspot.com
I was at that moment preparing for the annual IRC Chat with the Sime~Gen fans and domain crew folks. This year we announced the reprints and new volumes of Sime~Gen novels that the Borgo Press imprint of Wildside Press plans to bring out in 2011. We have turned almost all of them in -- my original novel FARRIS CHANNEL (not First Channel, that's a reprint -- this one is FARRIS Channel) will be the last turned in some months from now.
Wildside wants to list these novels as a series with numbers, and chose the following list:
THE SIME~GEN SERIES from The Borgo Press
House of Zeor, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#1)
Unto Zeor, Forever, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#2)
First Channel, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#3)
Mahogany Trinrose, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#4)
Channel’s Destiny, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#5)
RenSime, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#6)
Ambrov Keon, by Jean Lorrah (#7)
Zelerod’s Doom, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah (#8)
Personal Recognizance, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#9)
The Story Untold and Other Stories, by Jean Lorrah (#10)
To Kiss or to Kill, by Jean Lorrah (#11)
The Farris Channel, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#12)
Here is our chronology internal to the fictional universe:
-533 First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
-518 Channel’s Destiny by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
-468 The Farris Channel by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
-20 Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah
-15 House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
0 Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah
1 To Kiss Or To Kill by Jean Lorrah
1 The Story Untold And Other Sime~Gen Stories by Jean Lorrah
132 Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
152 Mahogany Trinrose by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
224 Unity – “Operation High Time” by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
232 RenSime by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
245 Personal Recognizance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Both chronologies are being printed in the Borgo Press editions and will be used to create promotional material.
-------------
The full chronology with details is available at
http://www.simegen.com/CHRONO1.html
So then I went to http://vampchix.blogspot.com/ and looked closely at what folks had been talking about lately.
Oh, way too much to say on all that.
Besides Michele had invited me to do a post for February 7, 2011 (yesterday), and I'd no idea what might be discussed in the meantime.
But reading recent posts on VampChix brought a new focus to the Sime~Gen project. So I decided to write about Jean Lorrah's fateful review of the first Sime~Gen novel, House of Zeor, titled VAMPIRE IN MUDDY BOOTS.
A few days later, I did that and sent it off to Michelle for the February 7th posting. At the same time I was in the middle of the weekly #scifichat on twitter where Bob Vardeman was the Guest @bobv451 (go check him out on Amazon - he's amazing). Like Jean, he'd written a couple Star Trek novels for Pocket Books, and the topic for this chat was Starship Captains.
Someone else on that chat commented about how averse they were to the concept of a Star Trek/Loveboat mashup.
Guess what I want to talk about here next?
Meanwhile, I'm trying to lay plans to go to Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention.
Gene Roddenberry gave the first sneak-debut of Star Trek at the 24th Worldcon, Tricon, in Cleveland in 1966 with about 850 in attendance. (more than 1,100 people have read some of my posts on this blog).
So anyone planning to be at Renovation, drop a note here please or email me.
Oh, and guess who turned up on Backlist Ebooks group -- Vonda McIntyre. C.J. Cherryh is also a member. The members who have Kindle versions of their backlist novels available are listed at
http://backlistebooks.com/ -- click the "store" tab at the top. It's a who's who of writing craft.
So you see, 1966 to 2011 -- it's all about social networking, only today our networks are much bigger.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
On the day after New Year's 2011, Michele Hauf invited me to do a guest post at her bog VampChix - which is about what it says it's about.
Of course I said yes without thinking -- after all, Vampires are my beat. You see a lot of familiar names over at Vampchix.blogspot.com
I was at that moment preparing for the annual IRC Chat with the Sime~Gen fans and domain crew folks. This year we announced the reprints and new volumes of Sime~Gen novels that the Borgo Press imprint of Wildside Press plans to bring out in 2011. We have turned almost all of them in -- my original novel FARRIS CHANNEL (not First Channel, that's a reprint -- this one is FARRIS Channel) will be the last turned in some months from now.
Wildside wants to list these novels as a series with numbers, and chose the following list:
THE SIME~GEN SERIES from The Borgo Press
House of Zeor, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#1)
Unto Zeor, Forever, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#2)
First Channel, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#3)
Mahogany Trinrose, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#4)
Channel’s Destiny, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#5)
RenSime, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#6)
Ambrov Keon, by Jean Lorrah (#7)
Zelerod’s Doom, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah (#8)
Personal Recognizance, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#9)
The Story Untold and Other Stories, by Jean Lorrah (#10)
To Kiss or to Kill, by Jean Lorrah (#11)
The Farris Channel, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg (#12)
Here is our chronology internal to the fictional universe:
-533 First Channel by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
-518 Channel’s Destiny by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg
-468 The Farris Channel by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
-20 Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah
-15 House of Zeor by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
0 Zelerod’s Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah
1 To Kiss Or To Kill by Jean Lorrah
1 The Story Untold And Other Sime~Gen Stories by Jean Lorrah
132 Unto Zeor, Forever by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
152 Mahogany Trinrose by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
224 Unity – “Operation High Time” by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
232 RenSime by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
245 Personal Recognizance by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Both chronologies are being printed in the Borgo Press editions and will be used to create promotional material.
-------------
The full chronology with details is available at
http://www.simegen.com/CHRONO1.html
So then I went to http://vampchix.blogspot.com/ and looked closely at what folks had been talking about lately.
Oh, way too much to say on all that.
Besides Michele had invited me to do a post for February 7, 2011 (yesterday), and I'd no idea what might be discussed in the meantime.
But reading recent posts on VampChix brought a new focus to the Sime~Gen project. So I decided to write about Jean Lorrah's fateful review of the first Sime~Gen novel, House of Zeor, titled VAMPIRE IN MUDDY BOOTS.
A few days later, I did that and sent it off to Michelle for the February 7th posting. At the same time I was in the middle of the weekly #scifichat on twitter where Bob Vardeman was the Guest @bobv451 (go check him out on Amazon - he's amazing). Like Jean, he'd written a couple Star Trek novels for Pocket Books, and the topic for this chat was Starship Captains.
Someone else on that chat commented about how averse they were to the concept of a Star Trek/Loveboat mashup.
Guess what I want to talk about here next?
Meanwhile, I'm trying to lay plans to go to Renovation, the 69th World Science Fiction Convention.
Gene Roddenberry gave the first sneak-debut of Star Trek at the 24th Worldcon, Tricon, in Cleveland in 1966 with about 850 in attendance. (more than 1,100 people have read some of my posts on this blog).
So anyone planning to be at Renovation, drop a note here please or email me.
Oh, and guess who turned up on Backlist Ebooks group -- Vonda McIntyre. C.J. Cherryh is also a member. The members who have Kindle versions of their backlist novels available are listed at
http://backlistebooks.com/ -- click the "store" tab at the top. It's a who's who of writing craft.
So you see, 1966 to 2011 -- it's all about social networking, only today our networks are much bigger.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, February 06, 2011
A Word From So-Called Pirates
"Please note: We are a 'Non-Profit' organisation, our mission is solely to help those people who struggle to make ends meet, by providing them with a few little treats they could normally not afford! We are not the 'hosts' of any books etc, neither did we upload them to any hosting provider. We simply search for links to books etc, that are freely available on the web and share our findings with our members, however, IF YOU HAVE A DMCA or ABUSE COMPLAINT about a particular item listed on our pages (eg; if you are the author/publisher!) and would like it removed, please send an email to: dmcainvestigations@gmail.com letting us know which item you are refering to, from what page it is listed on, and your association to the item, we will then investigate the issue and permanently remove the item in accordance with DMCA rules"
These good-hearted providers of little treats use only FILESONIC.
Does anyone seriously believe that these people are not affiliates? Check out what affiliates are paid.
Up to $60 for 1,000 downloads!
That is 6 cents per download.
If these not-quite-pirates did not upload the books to FILESONIC (their sole source), I wonder who did?
If they search the web for freely available books, why does every search take them to Filesonic?
It would be really interesting to know who on the site (currently a yolasite) hosts the Amazon review descriptions. Possibly these people don't realize that they may not be infringing copyright by posting links to Filesonic, but they are infringing copyright by hosting allegedly plagiarized reviews from Amazon.
These "little treats" occasionally consist of a systematic "sharing" of ten or more books written by one author in one "collection". In this author's opinion, if you share an entire series, you are not offering "a little treat", you are maliciously and deliberately attacking an author's life's work and undermining his or her future ability to earn a living.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Net Neutrality and Writers
Cory Doctorow talks about net neutrality and "leverage" for writers in the current issue of LOCUS:
Net Neutrality
So far, we've heard mostly about the burden a non-neutral Internet would place on the average user, which Doctorow illustrates with an analogy of the phone company's putting your call to the neighborhood pizza joint on hold but fast-tracking your call to Domino's. What he discusses in this article, however, is the potentially disastrous effect on artists trying to market their creations. Copyright, he maintains, supplies "negotiating leverage" for "a writer whose mere name can sell books." For those authors, copyright constitutes "a moderately successful tool for extracting funds from publishers." For the rest of us, though, the wide-open field of the Internet serves a similar function, a concept that never occurred to me from quite that angle before. Now we can reach an audience without going through the "gatekeeper" of a large publisher. At the "bottom of the market," the traditional institutions have to compete with someone besides each other. Here's Doctorow's striking summary of the beneficial effects of a neutral Internet:
"A negotiation in which the two choices are 'Do it my way' and 'Go pound sand' is not one that will end well for the supplicant. The mere existence of a better option than 'Go pound sand' raises the floor on our negotiations."
I'm not so sure I agree with this optimistic viewpoint. Even at the bottom of the market (where, as Doctorow points out, the majority of us will spend most of our careers), I'm not convinced major publishers are always aware of the niche publishers' existence, let alone affected by it. Nevertheless, I do greatly value having somewhere other than New York to offer my work, and of course I feel strongly about net neutrality.
This issue of LOCUS features a whole section of essays from various authors about "SF in the digital age," which I haven't read yet. I'm eager to find out what they're saying. (My first reaction was, "LOCUS recognizes the digital age? About time"—considering their reluctance, so far, to review e-books, an odd approach for an SF magazine.)
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Net Neutrality
So far, we've heard mostly about the burden a non-neutral Internet would place on the average user, which Doctorow illustrates with an analogy of the phone company's putting your call to the neighborhood pizza joint on hold but fast-tracking your call to Domino's. What he discusses in this article, however, is the potentially disastrous effect on artists trying to market their creations. Copyright, he maintains, supplies "negotiating leverage" for "a writer whose mere name can sell books." For those authors, copyright constitutes "a moderately successful tool for extracting funds from publishers." For the rest of us, though, the wide-open field of the Internet serves a similar function, a concept that never occurred to me from quite that angle before. Now we can reach an audience without going through the "gatekeeper" of a large publisher. At the "bottom of the market," the traditional institutions have to compete with someone besides each other. Here's Doctorow's striking summary of the beneficial effects of a neutral Internet:
"A negotiation in which the two choices are 'Do it my way' and 'Go pound sand' is not one that will end well for the supplicant. The mere existence of a better option than 'Go pound sand' raises the floor on our negotiations."
I'm not so sure I agree with this optimistic viewpoint. Even at the bottom of the market (where, as Doctorow points out, the majority of us will spend most of our careers), I'm not convinced major publishers are always aware of the niche publishers' existence, let alone affected by it. Nevertheless, I do greatly value having somewhere other than New York to offer my work, and of course I feel strongly about net neutrality.
This issue of LOCUS features a whole section of essays from various authors about "SF in the digital age," which I haven't read yet. I'm eager to find out what they're saying. (My first reaction was, "LOCUS recognizes the digital age? About time"—considering their reluctance, so far, to review e-books, an odd approach for an SF magazine.)
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
How To Change Perception Of Romance
OK, the November election is long over and everyone has simmered down.
But nobody, even the winners, are really satisfied, and the people who voted for the winners aren't even satisfied. Those who voted for the losers are gearing up to "fight again."
Most of us look at "politics" as a toxic swamp that functions more like a field of World War I muddy foxholes than like a managerial team.
But just as I pointed you toward studying the phenomenon of Glenn Beck -- NOT Beck himself, mind you, but the generating mechanism that caused the phenomenon which impacts so many in such a strange way -- I now have to point you to the study of politics.
This is an exercise in what screenwriters call SUBTEXT.
Philosophers, linguists and semanticists have other names for it. But we're fiction writers here, and we're trying to solve the problem of how and why the HEA, Romance and particularly Paranormal and Science Fiction Romance got such a horrid reputation among those who never (ever) even read it.
I mean, if you don't read Romance, how can you have an opinion about it?
See where I'm going with this?
People don't know politicians, but have opinions about them.
People don't understand economics, but have opinions about it.
Even professors don't understand economics -- they're making it up as they go along and winning Nobel Prizes for it, but they're all clueless about how economies actually work. If that were not the case, we wouldn't have a problem with the economy would we?
Does that sound like the field of professional fiction writing? Everyone has an opinion, but nobody understands it.
Yes, "economics" and "politics" and "government" and getting elected are an "artform" and actually close to writing because working as a politician is being a performing artist.
As I've told you, Alma Hill clued me in to the actual category of the writing craft -- writing is a performing art.
Well, so is politics.
And "selling" a politician or even just a political idea or stance (not even the whole philosophical package behind those ideas -- the whole "theme" of the created piece the politician is performing) works just exactly like selling books.
It's all about popularity.
And as any screenwriter will tell you up front, to get a film over the hump and into "popularity" one must be a virtuoso at subtext.
If your dialog is "on the nose" (putting the subconscious assumptions into delineated, direct, conscious expression) it won't work.
Men (or the masculine tendencies in everyone) are especially put off by this. Emotions must not be articulated. Emotional content has to be sub-subtext or they will run away before you can make your point.
Subtext carries the message, the theme, the point of the whole thing.
And that can be just tone of voice, or choice of vocabulary.
Actors master this early. You can say one thing, but convey another, and the audience will pick up on and believe the other.
Now if you've been studying commercials as I suggested long ago in these writing craft pieces, you already see this point.
The key to selling product in a commercial is tone of voice, music, -- the images and articulated message are there just to distract the audience so that the real message can be rammed into the subconscious where it will control behavior against the audience's will.
That's how it works, and it is now a practice reduced to a mathematical formula.
The Overton Window that I talked about is derived from that mathematical study of the behavior of large groups of people.
Individuals can't be controlled. But large groups can. The more uniform the individuals in the group, the more easily the larger group can be controlled -- like cowboys herding cattle. That's why they're called "cowpokes." They poke here and there, and five of them can control a thousand head of cattle.
Now what's happened on the political scene in 2010 was the result of a court decision regarding how money spent supporting candidates can be collected, spent and accounted for. In effect, the laws instituted to try to "clean up" elections turned out to be unconstitutional. So that opened the spigot for all kinds of funding to flow in all kinds of ways that the general public is not to be allowed to know about.
It's raining on the field of World War I muddy foxholes and the battlefield just got a whole lot more toxic.
As any writer knows, to generate a really great mystery plot, just re-analyze the events in terms of "follow the money" -- that's where murder motivations seethe.
Publishing likewise is all about making money.
Winning high political office sets people up to become wealthy themselves -- and I'm sure most of the deals they swing are perfectly legal which is what lures them into swinging shadier deals and eventually getting caught.
Lots of plot ideas in that, but let's stand way back and watch the publishing field as the color Nook and Barnes & Noble rule the roost for a while before they get shot down (maybe by Amazon?) It's warfare, trench warfare in publishing now.
And it's all about advertising.
Advertising is the war against readers.
The point of advertising is to get a reader to buy a book they don't want, just as advertising lures people into buying all sorts of other things they don't want or need. We are now an admittedly consumer driven economy (which I don't think is the best thing to be, but that's another discussion.)
Remember we're writers, and we write stories. The essence of story is conflict -- conflict generates both plot and story, and how that conflict plays out to a resolution states the theme. In other words, conflict is theme-driven.
Think back over this election and all the particolored junk that came in your snailmail and the flashing advertisements on TV, the posters and bill boards, handbills given out at grocery stores, and so forth.
Advertising is the war against voters.
Advertising is done by someone who wants to change someone else's behavior to be in accord with the benefit of the advertiser -- REGARDLESS of whether that benefits the recipient of the advertising or not.
And sometimes it does benefit the recipient. Here's a better cold remedy. Here's a way to get spots out of your carpet. Here's a more delicious coffee. Here's a really cheap shampoo that works better.
Sometimes ads tell the truth.
Sometimes they don't.
Regardless of the truth contained, advertising is more efficient at herding humans than cowpokes are at herding cows.
Cowpokes use bovine instinct to get results. Advertisers use subtext.
To become a popular writer, you must master the use of subtext.
To "sell" (by advertising) the theme "Love Conquers All" to those who disbelieve it, you must bury it deep in subtext and use it in your advertising (i.e. what screenwriters call a pitch).
That means you must study successful use of subtext in advertising.
The most efficient way to learn something is to watch someone else use it.
They still teach the Medical Arts by the "See One, Do One, Teach One" method, and there's a reason for that buried in the human brain's learning process.
But in writing, the best way to learn a technique is to see it, do it, and teach it in an artistic context different from the one where you intend to apply it.
That's why I did the long series of 20 posts on the Tarot which I hope you've finished reading and absorbing by now. Instead of focusing directly on writing techniques, you learn by focusing attention elsewhere and absorbing the essential lesson on writing from the subtext.
That's the drill that's most effective in absorbing any writing technique I've discussed "on the nose" in previous posts here.
So now look closely at the field of political advertising and the effectiveness of it, and think in terms of the "message" we are trying to get across about the HEA.
Here below is a brief excerpt from an email begging for contribution money for a "cause" rather than a "candidate" - just substitute HEA for the cause.
Note I chose this one, but the exact same language and subtext are in every one of these fund-raising emails -- I subscribe to one or two from every flavor of the political spectrum and study them for techniques. (one day you might need to write one as part of a plot, so study carefully.)
--------FROM DICK MORRIS--------
From the desk of Dick Morris
Dear Reader:
Let me tell you about the devastating ad we’re running right now to defeat THREE Pelosi Democrats from Arizona. It’s called “Stop the Arizona Three!”
You can be proud of this ad because donations from friends like you made this ad possible.
The ad is simple. It exposes the three Democratic politicians for voters to see. It says that Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell, and Gabrielle Giffords:
Voted for Obama’s massive healthcare takeover
Voted for a $500 billion Medicare cut
Voted for $1 trillion in wasted stimulus funds
Supported Nancy Pelosi
The ad ends with an appeal to “stop Obama’s tax hikes, his amnesty for illegals, and his job-killing policies.” And it closes with these words: “Vote for the candidates who share your values.”
The beauty of this ad is that we hit three birds with just one stone! For the cost of one ad, we can defeat three Pelosi Democrats!
And, thanks to your donations, we’re also running similar ads against Pelosi Democrats in Florida, West Virginia, Minnesota, Tennessee, Wisconsin and elsewhere. The ads all follow the same successful formula.
--------END QUOTE---------
Did you detect the subtext?
It's the same subtext you see in every single political fundraiser.
"I can get people to do what you want, not what they want, and all you have to do is give me money."
Now if you're any kind of writer, you've also studied carefully all the techniques used by grifters, confidence artists, to finesse you out of your money.
This is the same subtext used to victimize the retired folks who don't have enough money. "give me your money and I'll double it."
This is the same subtext used to hoodwink anyone into doing anything that is against that person's best interests.
MONEY CAN BUY ANYTHING.
And it's a subtext that's believed by a lot of people, but it's especially believed by the pragmatic people who pay attention to politics. The winner is always the one who has raised the most money. That's how we got George Bush as President. That's how we got Barak Obama as President.
And all the lesser offices work the same way.
It is so rare that the under-funded politician wins that when it does happen it's a national news story even if the office is local. It's the "man bites dog" story -- when "dog bites man" is not a news story.
I can make things the way you want them to be if you pay me money. Well, that wasn't enough money, give me more. Confidence men (women) can get people to give them entire fortunes a little at a time -- it wasn't enough, give me more. It's working, see? Every ponzi scheme works that way.
The pragmatic truth is that as politics is run today, political offices are for sale to the highest bidder. (this isn't new)
That happens not because of campaign funding laws, but because of the mathematicians behind The Overton Window.
Here's where I wrote about that:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
These people are changing the behavior (NOT THE MINDS) of vast herds of people by snapping a whip over their heads. (whip-snapping can be described mathematically).
Parents know the subtext technique because it's taught by all the parenting books and coaches and advisers about how to defuse the fights with teenagers.
This behavior control via subtext is built into human beings. (what if an alien species comes along that doesn't respond?)
So one of the elements we must master in order to change the perception of the romance genre in the eyes of the larger, general public (especially men) is subtext.
Dick Morris's (and the other fund-raisers) message is "give me money and I'll make the world the way you want it to be."
As I read it, that is the exact opposite of the message the Romance Genre carries. I've rarely encountered an HEA ending that carries the theme "money can buy happiness."
Nevertheless, the vast majority in America does behave as if money can buy happiness. Look at all the hundreds of millions of dollars given to political campaigns. Lots of it is given by businesses, and they know they will make a profit on that investment as will the politicians. (Look at those who give money to their own campaign chests!)
Look at the very rich who give away all their wealth to a "Foundation" -- well, even though other names may appear on the letterhead the person who gives the funds to the foundation controls the way that wealth is used. Giving it away doesn't lessen their "power" -- it increases it. And the maneuver keeps the control of that wealth from the government.
Control of money, "power" can buy happiness, satisfaction, or an HEA. But "Love" can't.
That's the behavior.
That behavior is at odds with the professed, "on the nose" statements articulated by these same people.
Everyone says they accept the scientific studies that show health, long life, satisfaction and a sense of being "successful" come from binding family relationships. But faced with an email like Dick Morris's - they readily give money. (by the millions of dollars, too)
Is the problem with the Romance HEA that it's "on the nose?"
How do we get HEA and Love Conquers All into subtext, then bullet point it into an advertisement modeled on Dick Morris's successful fundraising campaign? Controlling all those millions of dollars gave Morris's organization (a non-profit) the kind of "power" that comes from controlling money.
Why does controlling money bestow power?
That question brings us to the philosophical core of the essence of all fiction, but it's especially relevant to Romance because the flip-side of "Romance" is sex, and sex is power personified (for humans; maybe aliens function differently?)
When a person harbors a belief that is at odds with their behavior, you have the main ingredient for a main point of view character for a novel.
When you can define the exact conflict between the belief and the behavior in such a way that it mirrors a conflict resident and active in a large demographic, you have a best seller that can be made into a blockbuster, opens-everywhere film such as Blake Snyder analyzes in his Save The Cat! series.
Ultimately, the resolution of that conflict between belief and behavior bestows upon an individual power over their lives.
That is the essence of the HEA -- power over your own life.
People may be futilely pouring money into poltical campaigns responding to the subtext promise that this act will gain them power over their own life.
Since it never happens, how can those same people buy a Romance novel and expect to read how to resolve their conflict in such a way that they will gain power over their own life and thus achieve the HEA depicted in the novel?
We need to move the Overton Window (I do hope you've read my post on that and the links in it or you won't understand what I'm talking about here) -- we need to alter the perception of what is possible and how to achieve it.
Look closely at the Soul Mate concept and you will see that the philosophy behind it, (the Soul exists), implies individuality and a unique individuality at that.
Each of us is half of some whole. The other half is our Soul Mate.
Read the Tarot posts, or remember them. Here are 2 posts listing the 20 Tarot posts.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
The writer learns to parse people into characters to write about by distinguishing between what we all share in common and that carefully defined uniqueness of individuality. Lots of philosophies do this, but I've round Tarot the fastest way to learn to use it in writing. (not fortune telling or telling the future -- understanding the present nature of human experience)
That Soul Mate concept makes no sense to people whose individuality has been worn away. It makes no sense to the nail that stuck up and got hammered down - to those taught "conform or die" and "different is dead."
If you believe that individuality is wrong, and that the individuality of others is a danger to you and must be controlled by "the government" or whatever instrumentality you fund, the whole HEA concept will just not seem plausible, realistic or desireable. It certainly won't be entertaining.
Love is a phenomenon of the uniqueness of an individual. Love happens when you percieve that uniqueness in another.
See my post "What Does She See In Him" for more on that.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
The terrible urgency of Romance derives from the uniqueness of the experience of this ONE INDIVIDUAL PERSON in your life. There will never be another.
That's the love that generates Romance leading to an HEA where the couple mutually and individually exercise power over their own life.
The ambience of "Romance" blurs the very existence of "the real world" around one so the individuality of That One Unique Other is the total focus. You don't see how we are all the same when you are focused on that uniqueness.
That "blurring" is the result of a Neptune Transit which represents a very spiritual state that not everyone can handle well. Either you see reality with utter clarity for a time, or you become completely befuddled and confused.
Here is a list of some of my posts on Astrology Just For Writers that discuss how a writer can use Astrology as a plotting tool by understanding how it describes the elements in us all that bind us, that make our life experiences identical.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
We are a herd of identical people. Exploiting that attribute of humanity makes these political fundraiser efforts successful.
We are unique individuals.
Exploiting that attribute of humanity makes the Romance Genre, the HEA and the Love Conquers All theme profitable for publishers.
Study the political fundraising techniques and the results. Study the popularity of Glenn Beck and whatever new phenomenon personality appears on the scene. Don't study the text Beck presents, study the subtext and more important than the content of his subtext study how his promoters use that subtext.
Apply your discoveries to your writing.
The younger your target readership, the bigger the effect you will have on the future of humanity, so be very careful what you encode into subtext.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
But nobody, even the winners, are really satisfied, and the people who voted for the winners aren't even satisfied. Those who voted for the losers are gearing up to "fight again."
Most of us look at "politics" as a toxic swamp that functions more like a field of World War I muddy foxholes than like a managerial team.
But just as I pointed you toward studying the phenomenon of Glenn Beck -- NOT Beck himself, mind you, but the generating mechanism that caused the phenomenon which impacts so many in such a strange way -- I now have to point you to the study of politics.
This is an exercise in what screenwriters call SUBTEXT.
Philosophers, linguists and semanticists have other names for it. But we're fiction writers here, and we're trying to solve the problem of how and why the HEA, Romance and particularly Paranormal and Science Fiction Romance got such a horrid reputation among those who never (ever) even read it.
I mean, if you don't read Romance, how can you have an opinion about it?
See where I'm going with this?
People don't know politicians, but have opinions about them.
People don't understand economics, but have opinions about it.
Even professors don't understand economics -- they're making it up as they go along and winning Nobel Prizes for it, but they're all clueless about how economies actually work. If that were not the case, we wouldn't have a problem with the economy would we?
Does that sound like the field of professional fiction writing? Everyone has an opinion, but nobody understands it.
Yes, "economics" and "politics" and "government" and getting elected are an "artform" and actually close to writing because working as a politician is being a performing artist.
As I've told you, Alma Hill clued me in to the actual category of the writing craft -- writing is a performing art.
Well, so is politics.
And "selling" a politician or even just a political idea or stance (not even the whole philosophical package behind those ideas -- the whole "theme" of the created piece the politician is performing) works just exactly like selling books.
It's all about popularity.
And as any screenwriter will tell you up front, to get a film over the hump and into "popularity" one must be a virtuoso at subtext.
If your dialog is "on the nose" (putting the subconscious assumptions into delineated, direct, conscious expression) it won't work.
Men (or the masculine tendencies in everyone) are especially put off by this. Emotions must not be articulated. Emotional content has to be sub-subtext or they will run away before you can make your point.
Subtext carries the message, the theme, the point of the whole thing.
And that can be just tone of voice, or choice of vocabulary.
Actors master this early. You can say one thing, but convey another, and the audience will pick up on and believe the other.
Now if you've been studying commercials as I suggested long ago in these writing craft pieces, you already see this point.
The key to selling product in a commercial is tone of voice, music, -- the images and articulated message are there just to distract the audience so that the real message can be rammed into the subconscious where it will control behavior against the audience's will.
That's how it works, and it is now a practice reduced to a mathematical formula.
The Overton Window that I talked about is derived from that mathematical study of the behavior of large groups of people.
Individuals can't be controlled. But large groups can. The more uniform the individuals in the group, the more easily the larger group can be controlled -- like cowboys herding cattle. That's why they're called "cowpokes." They poke here and there, and five of them can control a thousand head of cattle.
Now what's happened on the political scene in 2010 was the result of a court decision regarding how money spent supporting candidates can be collected, spent and accounted for. In effect, the laws instituted to try to "clean up" elections turned out to be unconstitutional. So that opened the spigot for all kinds of funding to flow in all kinds of ways that the general public is not to be allowed to know about.
It's raining on the field of World War I muddy foxholes and the battlefield just got a whole lot more toxic.
As any writer knows, to generate a really great mystery plot, just re-analyze the events in terms of "follow the money" -- that's where murder motivations seethe.
Publishing likewise is all about making money.
Winning high political office sets people up to become wealthy themselves -- and I'm sure most of the deals they swing are perfectly legal which is what lures them into swinging shadier deals and eventually getting caught.
Lots of plot ideas in that, but let's stand way back and watch the publishing field as the color Nook and Barnes & Noble rule the roost for a while before they get shot down (maybe by Amazon?) It's warfare, trench warfare in publishing now.
And it's all about advertising.
Advertising is the war against readers.
The point of advertising is to get a reader to buy a book they don't want, just as advertising lures people into buying all sorts of other things they don't want or need. We are now an admittedly consumer driven economy (which I don't think is the best thing to be, but that's another discussion.)
Remember we're writers, and we write stories. The essence of story is conflict -- conflict generates both plot and story, and how that conflict plays out to a resolution states the theme. In other words, conflict is theme-driven.
Think back over this election and all the particolored junk that came in your snailmail and the flashing advertisements on TV, the posters and bill boards, handbills given out at grocery stores, and so forth.
Advertising is the war against voters.
Advertising is done by someone who wants to change someone else's behavior to be in accord with the benefit of the advertiser -- REGARDLESS of whether that benefits the recipient of the advertising or not.
And sometimes it does benefit the recipient. Here's a better cold remedy. Here's a way to get spots out of your carpet. Here's a more delicious coffee. Here's a really cheap shampoo that works better.
Sometimes ads tell the truth.
Sometimes they don't.
Regardless of the truth contained, advertising is more efficient at herding humans than cowpokes are at herding cows.
Cowpokes use bovine instinct to get results. Advertisers use subtext.
To become a popular writer, you must master the use of subtext.
To "sell" (by advertising) the theme "Love Conquers All" to those who disbelieve it, you must bury it deep in subtext and use it in your advertising (i.e. what screenwriters call a pitch).
That means you must study successful use of subtext in advertising.
The most efficient way to learn something is to watch someone else use it.
They still teach the Medical Arts by the "See One, Do One, Teach One" method, and there's a reason for that buried in the human brain's learning process.
But in writing, the best way to learn a technique is to see it, do it, and teach it in an artistic context different from the one where you intend to apply it.
That's why I did the long series of 20 posts on the Tarot which I hope you've finished reading and absorbing by now. Instead of focusing directly on writing techniques, you learn by focusing attention elsewhere and absorbing the essential lesson on writing from the subtext.
That's the drill that's most effective in absorbing any writing technique I've discussed "on the nose" in previous posts here.
So now look closely at the field of political advertising and the effectiveness of it, and think in terms of the "message" we are trying to get across about the HEA.
Here below is a brief excerpt from an email begging for contribution money for a "cause" rather than a "candidate" - just substitute HEA for the cause.
Note I chose this one, but the exact same language and subtext are in every one of these fund-raising emails -- I subscribe to one or two from every flavor of the political spectrum and study them for techniques. (one day you might need to write one as part of a plot, so study carefully.)
--------FROM DICK MORRIS--------
From the desk of Dick Morris
Dear Reader:
Let me tell you about the devastating ad we’re running right now to defeat THREE Pelosi Democrats from Arizona. It’s called “Stop the Arizona Three!”
You can be proud of this ad because donations from friends like you made this ad possible.
The ad is simple. It exposes the three Democratic politicians for voters to see. It says that Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell, and Gabrielle Giffords:
Voted for Obama’s massive healthcare takeover
Voted for a $500 billion Medicare cut
Voted for $1 trillion in wasted stimulus funds
Supported Nancy Pelosi
The ad ends with an appeal to “stop Obama’s tax hikes, his amnesty for illegals, and his job-killing policies.” And it closes with these words: “Vote for the candidates who share your values.”
The beauty of this ad is that we hit three birds with just one stone! For the cost of one ad, we can defeat three Pelosi Democrats!
And, thanks to your donations, we’re also running similar ads against Pelosi Democrats in Florida, West Virginia, Minnesota, Tennessee, Wisconsin and elsewhere. The ads all follow the same successful formula.
--------END QUOTE---------
Did you detect the subtext?
It's the same subtext you see in every single political fundraiser.
"I can get people to do what you want, not what they want, and all you have to do is give me money."
Now if you're any kind of writer, you've also studied carefully all the techniques used by grifters, confidence artists, to finesse you out of your money.
This is the same subtext used to victimize the retired folks who don't have enough money. "give me your money and I'll double it."
This is the same subtext used to hoodwink anyone into doing anything that is against that person's best interests.
MONEY CAN BUY ANYTHING.
And it's a subtext that's believed by a lot of people, but it's especially believed by the pragmatic people who pay attention to politics. The winner is always the one who has raised the most money. That's how we got George Bush as President. That's how we got Barak Obama as President.
And all the lesser offices work the same way.
It is so rare that the under-funded politician wins that when it does happen it's a national news story even if the office is local. It's the "man bites dog" story -- when "dog bites man" is not a news story.
I can make things the way you want them to be if you pay me money. Well, that wasn't enough money, give me more. Confidence men (women) can get people to give them entire fortunes a little at a time -- it wasn't enough, give me more. It's working, see? Every ponzi scheme works that way.
The pragmatic truth is that as politics is run today, political offices are for sale to the highest bidder. (this isn't new)
That happens not because of campaign funding laws, but because of the mathematicians behind The Overton Window.
Here's where I wrote about that:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
These people are changing the behavior (NOT THE MINDS) of vast herds of people by snapping a whip over their heads. (whip-snapping can be described mathematically).
Parents know the subtext technique because it's taught by all the parenting books and coaches and advisers about how to defuse the fights with teenagers.
This behavior control via subtext is built into human beings. (what if an alien species comes along that doesn't respond?)
So one of the elements we must master in order to change the perception of the romance genre in the eyes of the larger, general public (especially men) is subtext.
Dick Morris's (and the other fund-raisers) message is "give me money and I'll make the world the way you want it to be."
As I read it, that is the exact opposite of the message the Romance Genre carries. I've rarely encountered an HEA ending that carries the theme "money can buy happiness."
Nevertheless, the vast majority in America does behave as if money can buy happiness. Look at all the hundreds of millions of dollars given to political campaigns. Lots of it is given by businesses, and they know they will make a profit on that investment as will the politicians. (Look at those who give money to their own campaign chests!)
Look at the very rich who give away all their wealth to a "Foundation" -- well, even though other names may appear on the letterhead the person who gives the funds to the foundation controls the way that wealth is used. Giving it away doesn't lessen their "power" -- it increases it. And the maneuver keeps the control of that wealth from the government.
Control of money, "power" can buy happiness, satisfaction, or an HEA. But "Love" can't.
That's the behavior.
That behavior is at odds with the professed, "on the nose" statements articulated by these same people.
Everyone says they accept the scientific studies that show health, long life, satisfaction and a sense of being "successful" come from binding family relationships. But faced with an email like Dick Morris's - they readily give money. (by the millions of dollars, too)
Is the problem with the Romance HEA that it's "on the nose?"
How do we get HEA and Love Conquers All into subtext, then bullet point it into an advertisement modeled on Dick Morris's successful fundraising campaign? Controlling all those millions of dollars gave Morris's organization (a non-profit) the kind of "power" that comes from controlling money.
Why does controlling money bestow power?
That question brings us to the philosophical core of the essence of all fiction, but it's especially relevant to Romance because the flip-side of "Romance" is sex, and sex is power personified (for humans; maybe aliens function differently?)
When a person harbors a belief that is at odds with their behavior, you have the main ingredient for a main point of view character for a novel.
When you can define the exact conflict between the belief and the behavior in such a way that it mirrors a conflict resident and active in a large demographic, you have a best seller that can be made into a blockbuster, opens-everywhere film such as Blake Snyder analyzes in his Save The Cat! series.
Ultimately, the resolution of that conflict between belief and behavior bestows upon an individual power over their lives.
That is the essence of the HEA -- power over your own life.
People may be futilely pouring money into poltical campaigns responding to the subtext promise that this act will gain them power over their own life.
Since it never happens, how can those same people buy a Romance novel and expect to read how to resolve their conflict in such a way that they will gain power over their own life and thus achieve the HEA depicted in the novel?
We need to move the Overton Window (I do hope you've read my post on that and the links in it or you won't understand what I'm talking about here) -- we need to alter the perception of what is possible and how to achieve it.
Look closely at the Soul Mate concept and you will see that the philosophy behind it, (the Soul exists), implies individuality and a unique individuality at that.
Each of us is half of some whole. The other half is our Soul Mate.
Read the Tarot posts, or remember them. Here are 2 posts listing the 20 Tarot posts.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
The writer learns to parse people into characters to write about by distinguishing between what we all share in common and that carefully defined uniqueness of individuality. Lots of philosophies do this, but I've round Tarot the fastest way to learn to use it in writing. (not fortune telling or telling the future -- understanding the present nature of human experience)
That Soul Mate concept makes no sense to people whose individuality has been worn away. It makes no sense to the nail that stuck up and got hammered down - to those taught "conform or die" and "different is dead."
If you believe that individuality is wrong, and that the individuality of others is a danger to you and must be controlled by "the government" or whatever instrumentality you fund, the whole HEA concept will just not seem plausible, realistic or desireable. It certainly won't be entertaining.
Love is a phenomenon of the uniqueness of an individual. Love happens when you percieve that uniqueness in another.
See my post "What Does She See In Him" for more on that.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
The terrible urgency of Romance derives from the uniqueness of the experience of this ONE INDIVIDUAL PERSON in your life. There will never be another.
That's the love that generates Romance leading to an HEA where the couple mutually and individually exercise power over their own life.
The ambience of "Romance" blurs the very existence of "the real world" around one so the individuality of That One Unique Other is the total focus. You don't see how we are all the same when you are focused on that uniqueness.
That "blurring" is the result of a Neptune Transit which represents a very spiritual state that not everyone can handle well. Either you see reality with utter clarity for a time, or you become completely befuddled and confused.
Here is a list of some of my posts on Astrology Just For Writers that discuss how a writer can use Astrology as a plotting tool by understanding how it describes the elements in us all that bind us, that make our life experiences identical.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
We are a herd of identical people. Exploiting that attribute of humanity makes these political fundraiser efforts successful.
We are unique individuals.
Exploiting that attribute of humanity makes the Romance Genre, the HEA and the Love Conquers All theme profitable for publishers.
Study the political fundraising techniques and the results. Study the popularity of Glenn Beck and whatever new phenomenon personality appears on the scene. Don't study the text Beck presents, study the subtext and more important than the content of his subtext study how his promoters use that subtext.
Apply your discoveries to your writing.
The younger your target readership, the bigger the effect you will have on the future of humanity, so be very careful what you encode into subtext.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, January 30, 2011
What I'm Watching
Last night, I watched the THE HISTORY CHANNEL. Those interested in speculative fiction or science fiction should check out the programming from the evening of Saturday, January 29th.
I highly recommend "The Prophets of Doom" and also the preceding program about The Earth, "Megaquake". Did you know that America once attempted to split in half, along the line where the Mississippi flows, and that those who live in New Madrid, St Louis, Mephis etc are on a massive fault line?
How deep could the Mississippi be? I'm thinking "An American Loch Ness".
Loch Ness is a techtonic lake. The Mississippi could be --in part-- a techtonic river.
Here's how my thoughts ran. "What's in Your Water?" one of the Prophets of Doom asked in so many words. He talked about the effect of coffee-drinking on fish. Fish drink coffee because coffee-lovers flush processed coffee down the toilet every day, and the sewage treatment facilities are not designed to remove coffee from our effluent. Nor are they set up to remove Viagra, for that matter.
So, coffee-spiked water is discharged into the rivers where the fish live and breathe. What might be in the rivers around Hollywood? What are the fish involuntarily snorting down there? Liquid crack? Boner pills? Oh dear!
Apparently, it is Hospice policy to pour all unused medicines down toilets when a Hospice patient dies at home. That's a sizeable cocktail of morphine, plavix, industrial strength senna pods, ritalin.... no wonder Canada geese make such a mess.
But, I'm getting away from Nature's crack. The American "Trouser Cleavage" aka New Madrid Fault which was formed about 750 million years ago. There wouldn't have been significant life around the Rodinia supercontinent in the NeoProterozoic Era. Nor would there have been dinosaurs ready and willing to swim upriver on February 7th 1812 when the Mississippi briefly reversed course (if it did indeed flow inland, and I believe that it only flowed backward for a relatively short stretch inside Kentucky, not all the way from the Gulf... which would have been far more exciting).
Fans of trilobites and archeocyanthids, please forgive my disrespect. I am sure those hard-shelled creatures could mutate appallingly under very wrong conditions. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert of the limits imposed on growth and sex by an exoskeleton.
Personally, if I can't have a plesiosaur, I'd rather have a monster croc or mutated dolphin running amok up and down the Mississippi, or even a mudskipper, than an ancient Horseshoe Crab on steroids.
What would you put in the water?
I highly recommend "The Prophets of Doom" and also the preceding program about The Earth, "Megaquake". Did you know that America once attempted to split in half, along the line where the Mississippi flows, and that those who live in New Madrid, St Louis, Mephis etc are on a massive fault line?
How deep could the Mississippi be? I'm thinking "An American Loch Ness".
Loch Ness is a techtonic lake. The Mississippi could be --in part-- a techtonic river.
Here's how my thoughts ran. "What's in Your Water?" one of the Prophets of Doom asked in so many words. He talked about the effect of coffee-drinking on fish. Fish drink coffee because coffee-lovers flush processed coffee down the toilet every day, and the sewage treatment facilities are not designed to remove coffee from our effluent. Nor are they set up to remove Viagra, for that matter.
So, coffee-spiked water is discharged into the rivers where the fish live and breathe. What might be in the rivers around Hollywood? What are the fish involuntarily snorting down there? Liquid crack? Boner pills? Oh dear!
Apparently, it is Hospice policy to pour all unused medicines down toilets when a Hospice patient dies at home. That's a sizeable cocktail of morphine, plavix, industrial strength senna pods, ritalin.... no wonder Canada geese make such a mess.
But, I'm getting away from Nature's crack. The American "Trouser Cleavage" aka New Madrid Fault which was formed about 750 million years ago. There wouldn't have been significant life around the Rodinia supercontinent in the NeoProterozoic Era. Nor would there have been dinosaurs ready and willing to swim upriver on February 7th 1812 when the Mississippi briefly reversed course (if it did indeed flow inland, and I believe that it only flowed backward for a relatively short stretch inside Kentucky, not all the way from the Gulf... which would have been far more exciting).
Fans of trilobites and archeocyanthids, please forgive my disrespect. I am sure those hard-shelled creatures could mutate appallingly under very wrong conditions. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an expert of the limits imposed on growth and sex by an exoskeleton.
Personally, if I can't have a plesiosaur, I'd rather have a monster croc or mutated dolphin running amok up and down the Mississippi, or even a mudskipper, than an ancient Horseshoe Crab on steroids.
What would you put in the water?
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Voyager
The Voyager 1 probe is approaching the boundary of our solar system. Truly we live in wondrous times! Here's the official NASA information site, with pictures:
Voyager
This spacecraft and its slower companion, Voyager 2, left Earth 33 years ago, and we are still in communication with them.
Though I don't expect a Voyager to return transformed by an alien intelligence, like Vjer in the STAR TREK movie, I would like to believe someday one of them may be found by another civilization that will want to make contact with us. The launch of these probes seems to me an impressive act of faith in the long-range future of our planet and species.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Voyager
This spacecraft and its slower companion, Voyager 2, left Earth 33 years ago, and we are still in communication with them.
Though I don't expect a Voyager to return transformed by an alien intelligence, like Vjer in the STAR TREK movie, I would like to believe someday one of them may be found by another civilization that will want to make contact with us. The launch of these probes seems to me an impressive act of faith in the long-range future of our planet and species.
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Gene Doucette Discusses his novel IMMORTAL
This below is a guest post by the author of the novel IMMORTAL that I discussed in my previous post here on January 18, 2011.
Of course I know he didn't intend to write an Action Romance or any kind of romance. I understood what he was doing, and I intended to make it clear that he did achieve that objective. My discussion and dissection of his novel is a writing lesson for those attempting to do something entirely foreign to Doucette's genre. I believe readers of this blog who love Romance and perhaps are writing Romance will find reading IMMORTAL to be a worthwhile experience simply because it is so far away from the Romance genre.
My personal reading tastes are broader than my readership's, or the intended readership for my professional review column. In fact, you might say I'm a professional reader. Nothing that is well written will fail to rivet my attention. I am a lifelong devotee of fanfiction. I even love badly written or "Mary Sue" fanfic!
At the end of his guest post, Doucette asks me a question. I shall answer. I highly recommend that you read what he says here carefully.
--------------GENE DOUCETTE---------------
I’m not certain how to begin a response to a critique that simultaneously describes Immortal as a chore to read and as something that could not be put down.
But I will try.
I’m going to start with the bottommost point, which is that this story should not belong to Adam the immortal narrator, but to Clara, a character that appears in roughly 1/4 of the book.
There are many things I could say about this suggestion, but to begin with the most obvious: it’s not her story, and I’m not interested enough in telling her story to build the novel around her. What I was interested in—what I am still interested in—is what it might really be like to live through the breadth of human history. If I wanted to tell that story through the eyes of a twenty-something year old college student, I would have written a different book.
(Read about what kind of book Immortal IS at http://genedoucette.me/immortal )
The description for that hypothetical book would have been “pretty young college student discovers an immortal man, and is pulled into a secret world of intrigue and danger. And she may be falling in love…” I expect the most common response to the description would be either, A: “oh; another one of those” or B: “is that the new Twilight book??”
This holds no interest for me.
Lichtenberg seemed to want me to write a different kind of book entirely, but this is not a romance, or even a love story. It’s also not about the moment in the life of a very old man in which he found his One True Love. It isn’t that the love story was given short shrift, it’s that there is no love story, triangle or otherwise. There is sex, and there is sexuality, but in this part of the life of my jaded protagonist, he is not coming across a One True anything. Or, to be more precise, he has come across several One True Loves in his lifetime, but this is not one of those times.
Adam is of course capable of love, and of caring about the people around him. Despite his age, he is very much human and very much a part of the human race. That means, like anyone, he has defense mechanisms to protect himself that leave him emotionally closed off much of the time. He is also not particularly good at talking about his feelings—unreliable narrator—so his actions are sometimes more telling than his words.
(Some words from Adam:
http://genedoucette.me/2010/07/20/immortal-excerpt-adam-explain-himself/
http://genedoucette.me/2010/07/13/immortal-quotes/)
So knowing what this book is not—a romance about a girl helping a sexy but mysterious immortal man—let’s talk about what it is.
As much as is possible I tried to put myself in the position of someone who had actually lived through history. I used “magical” characters because they made his history more interesting, and because the idea of playing with fantasy tropes and then stripping away all of the magic to see what was left appealed to me. But at the very core of it is Adam’s voice and his experiences. I had to make a number of discrete decisions and forced definitive limitations on myself—for instance, writing an action novel in first person is a real pain in the ass—in order to tell the story. I also had to decide what KIND of person, and personality, would be capable of living that long without dying accidentally or on purpose.
(One of my biggest beefs with the modern “romantic vampire” character is that they all act like twenty year olds. I think it’s perfectly possible for a person whose personality is stuck somewhere between Act III and Act V of Romeo and Juliet to become a vampire, but I find it incredibly unlikely for them to have survived beyond a couple of decades. It is not a survivor ethos.)
And so Adam’s personality—which Lichtenberg has lauded—is the result. A sarcastic, sometimes unpleasant, very clever man who tells the story of his life with a Raymond Chandler-esque bitterness.
(What others have said about Adam: http://genedoucette.me/media/ )
More generally, I find the points about convention and structure to be a bit strange. Why would I take my unconventionally structured, unconventional story and turn the whole thing around so that it’s about a different character, has none of what makes it compelling—the narrator’s voice—and jam it into a structure that so very many other novels already adhere to? At some point it stops being THIS novel and becomes someone else’s novel, and we’re about three steps past that.
(My discussion of genres: http://genedoucette.me/2010/10/07/on-genres/ )
“You have a lovely cat,” Lichtenberg seem to be saying, “and he would be even more perfect if he was a horse.”
Some other points:
--Adam’s unlikability. Lichtenberg comments that I have given myself an uphill battle in attempting to tell a story from the perspective of an unlikable character. My problem with this is I don’t think Adam’s unlikable. I never have. He is complicated, bitter, and drunk through much of the first part of the book, but I don’t believe him to be unlikable. Yet this is not the only place I have seen this comment, so I don’t know what more to say about it than “all right, but you still liked him enough to keep reading.”
(I discuss his apparent unlikability more in: http://genedoucette.me/2010/10/22/mary-sues-and-assholes/)
--Drinking. I thought the comment that Adam was unlikable specifically for enabling two college students by buying them alcohol was very telling. The implication being he’s buying for minors and that they would not have otherwise had access to alcohol. We are talking about COLLEGE here; this is a preposterous suggestion. There is also nothing in the text whereby Adam “keeps them drunk”, nor does he ply them with alcohol. He is not recklessly manipulating mortals into drinking with him; he’s drinking with mortals who are inclined to drink as well. As he says on multiple occasions, his preference is to hang out with bar drunks and college students. It’s a social thing.
A larger point would be that, again, this is a man who has lived an incredibly long time. It is only in the last hundred years or so that alcohol has developed a (deserved, I admit) stigma, and he was drunk for most of them and probably didn’t notice. In earlier times—one need not go back far at all, actually—drinking regularly and in large quantities was very common. His interest in drinking is perfectly in keeping with his character.
--Murder. It was hard to tell whether the “gritty realism” point was a critique or merely a comment, but I thought it worth pointing out that if one establishes a character that began life as an African tribesman sixty thousand years ago, one has to reconcile oneself with the fact that the character is a murderer. And again, look at the historical record of the human species: the remarkable thing is not that Adam has, can, and will commit murder to protect himself, but that he hold the lives of anyone other than himself to any degree of esteem. The idea that all life is sacred is a very new concept.
--The third act. I disagree with the suggestion that the switch from past tense to present tense is jarring and unnecessary. I think it’s fundamentally necessary if only for the obvious fact that the italicized sections at the beginning of each of the chapters in the rest of the book are all in present tense. More centrally, I find that the present tense makes the action in the final act much more palpable and direct. You already know, in every other part of the book, that Adam survives, because he’s telling the story from a safe distance. In present tense, while Adam is still narrating, some of that safety net is removed. It was something that began as a logical decision—because of the chapter pieces—that became what I consider a happy secondary result: a more gripping ending.
--Saving the cat. It should have been obvious to anyone reading the prologue—in which Adam recounts a time, eons ago, when he hunted and killed a large cat—that I’m thumbing my nose at this convention as well.
--Convoluted, expository lumps. I’m not really sure what to say about these comments. It’s a story about an immortal man told by an immortal man, with small historical tales nested inside of a larger present-day story arc. It’s not convoluted; Adam just has a lot to say.
Lichtenberg pointed out that there were things Adam talked about that she didn’t need to know, using the Egypt flashback as an example. The point of the novel was NOT to solve the overarching mystery of who is after Adam—which is revealed roughly the halfway point anyway—or necessarily even how he escapes. It is ONE point, but it is not THE point. THE point is, he’s an immortal man, he has some stories, and he’s sharing those stories. The Egypt passage was pertinent because it was on the subject of why he has trouble trusting women, and he’d just been put into a situation where he didn’t know if he could trust the woman he was sleeping with. It was a pertinent story, because it was a developing characteristic of Adam, and Adam IS the story. (And as a spoiler aside, the discussion of cultures revering men as gods is pertinent to Hellenic Immortal, the second book.)
In conclusion, I’d like to steal one of your points: look at the title. This book is called Immortal because it is about the immortal man telling the story. He may be complicated and some readers may not like him, but this is first and foremost a character study of someone who is, in my mind, an anthropomorphic representation of mankind. (And I mean man- not humankind.) The book has its digressions and its discursions, it may be messy at times, but it’s a compelling, interesting story that is difficult to put down.
So let me throw this back to Jacqueline Lichtenberg: in our past discussions you have lauded the idea of innovation and finding new ways to tell stories in fiction. You have been handed a book that ignores very nearly every convention yet manages to be addictively readable, and your response to this is to suggest what I think is a tired, conventional story I couldn’t even imagine WANTING to write. You clearly enjoyed the read. Why are you back-tracking?
----------END GENE DOUCETTE'S GUEST POST------------
Why am I "back-tracking?"
Of course, it doesn't seem that way to me. I would never do such a thing. I am all about the future, not the past.
You executed the "form" you chose for this novel perfectly (the pre-chapter inserts from captivity; the joining of the two plot threads.)
You applied that form expertly to the story you wanted to tell.
My judgment is (and there's a lot of taste involved in this) that the story you wanted to tell doesn't fit the form you chose. I see an artistic mis-match. The virtuoso performance of the writing art does not hide the major problem - passive hero, hung hero, lack of plot-movement.
I found the "couldn't put it down" appeal because I'm me, but I'm a very rare type of reader.
I judge that because of the artistic mismatch between form and story, the readership will be more limited than the story deserves.
I feel more people would be drawn to (reread and search for sequels) this character if the form matched the story artistically.
So to solve that problem which many beginning writers have and can't cover up the way you did, (and to demonstrate to writing students some points I've made previously) the writer either changes the form or the story -- or possibly both.
Switching the POV is one way to do that with dispatch and economy, to do it in a way that a commercial writer who is writing for profit (i.e. more than minimum wage) would prefer. But you can only do that way before you start to write, preferably before you "have the idea for the story."
Yes, of course shifting makes it a different story and changes the genre. In fact, that's a standard exercise in writing class - change genre by changing pov.
However, the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote.
The "can't put it down" story for me was the story of the young girl utterly caught up in the "affairs of wizards" and falling in love with this Immortal guy. (title would still apply perfectly from her POV -- that's ALL she can see; that's become her whole life.)
That "become her whole life" effect is the core effect of Romance Genre.
From her point of view it's a Romance. If you're not a Romance fan, reader or writer, small wonder you don't think that would be interesting, or that the novel would be utterly unique in the anals of commercial fiction.
If I wrote this story about this Immortal guy from that young girl's point of view (and from her POV the other woman is an arch rival and a threat) there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, about the resulting novel that could be described as "tired" or "conventional." Ask my fans if they'd expect that it would be tired or conventional coming from my hand.
But of course if I wrote the novel, the Immortal guy would have a totally different character. So the novel I want to read is the one you would write from her point of view.
When one writer reads work by another writer, they rewrite it in their heads to be their own.
And the brutal fact is that all readers do that too, sometimes without knowing it.
The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote. I learned that from Marion Zimmer Bradley who always quoted it from one of her mentors, and I don't recall who (which irks me).
It's no doubt something her mentor learned from someone else. It's forever true.
Writers don't do the innovating in the storytelling field. Readers do.
So thank you for giving your readers a glimpse of the inner workings of your mind as you crafted the first book in this budding series, IMMORTAL.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Of course I know he didn't intend to write an Action Romance or any kind of romance. I understood what he was doing, and I intended to make it clear that he did achieve that objective. My discussion and dissection of his novel is a writing lesson for those attempting to do something entirely foreign to Doucette's genre. I believe readers of this blog who love Romance and perhaps are writing Romance will find reading IMMORTAL to be a worthwhile experience simply because it is so far away from the Romance genre.
My personal reading tastes are broader than my readership's, or the intended readership for my professional review column. In fact, you might say I'm a professional reader. Nothing that is well written will fail to rivet my attention. I am a lifelong devotee of fanfiction. I even love badly written or "Mary Sue" fanfic!
At the end of his guest post, Doucette asks me a question. I shall answer. I highly recommend that you read what he says here carefully.
--------------GENE DOUCETTE---------------
I’m not certain how to begin a response to a critique that simultaneously describes Immortal as a chore to read and as something that could not be put down.
But I will try.
I’m going to start with the bottommost point, which is that this story should not belong to Adam the immortal narrator, but to Clara, a character that appears in roughly 1/4 of the book.
There are many things I could say about this suggestion, but to begin with the most obvious: it’s not her story, and I’m not interested enough in telling her story to build the novel around her. What I was interested in—what I am still interested in—is what it might really be like to live through the breadth of human history. If I wanted to tell that story through the eyes of a twenty-something year old college student, I would have written a different book.
(Read about what kind of book Immortal IS at http://genedoucette.me/immortal )
The description for that hypothetical book would have been “pretty young college student discovers an immortal man, and is pulled into a secret world of intrigue and danger. And she may be falling in love…” I expect the most common response to the description would be either, A: “oh; another one of those” or B: “is that the new Twilight book??”
This holds no interest for me.
Lichtenberg seemed to want me to write a different kind of book entirely, but this is not a romance, or even a love story. It’s also not about the moment in the life of a very old man in which he found his One True Love. It isn’t that the love story was given short shrift, it’s that there is no love story, triangle or otherwise. There is sex, and there is sexuality, but in this part of the life of my jaded protagonist, he is not coming across a One True anything. Or, to be more precise, he has come across several One True Loves in his lifetime, but this is not one of those times.
Adam is of course capable of love, and of caring about the people around him. Despite his age, he is very much human and very much a part of the human race. That means, like anyone, he has defense mechanisms to protect himself that leave him emotionally closed off much of the time. He is also not particularly good at talking about his feelings—unreliable narrator—so his actions are sometimes more telling than his words.
(Some words from Adam:
http://genedoucette.me/2010/07/20/immortal-excerpt-adam-explain-himself/
http://genedoucette.me/2010/07/13/immortal-quotes/)
So knowing what this book is not—a romance about a girl helping a sexy but mysterious immortal man—let’s talk about what it is.
As much as is possible I tried to put myself in the position of someone who had actually lived through history. I used “magical” characters because they made his history more interesting, and because the idea of playing with fantasy tropes and then stripping away all of the magic to see what was left appealed to me. But at the very core of it is Adam’s voice and his experiences. I had to make a number of discrete decisions and forced definitive limitations on myself—for instance, writing an action novel in first person is a real pain in the ass—in order to tell the story. I also had to decide what KIND of person, and personality, would be capable of living that long without dying accidentally or on purpose.
(One of my biggest beefs with the modern “romantic vampire” character is that they all act like twenty year olds. I think it’s perfectly possible for a person whose personality is stuck somewhere between Act III and Act V of Romeo and Juliet to become a vampire, but I find it incredibly unlikely for them to have survived beyond a couple of decades. It is not a survivor ethos.)
And so Adam’s personality—which Lichtenberg has lauded—is the result. A sarcastic, sometimes unpleasant, very clever man who tells the story of his life with a Raymond Chandler-esque bitterness.
(What others have said about Adam: http://genedoucette.me/media/ )
More generally, I find the points about convention and structure to be a bit strange. Why would I take my unconventionally structured, unconventional story and turn the whole thing around so that it’s about a different character, has none of what makes it compelling—the narrator’s voice—and jam it into a structure that so very many other novels already adhere to? At some point it stops being THIS novel and becomes someone else’s novel, and we’re about three steps past that.
(My discussion of genres: http://genedoucette.me/2010/10/07/on-genres/ )
“You have a lovely cat,” Lichtenberg seem to be saying, “and he would be even more perfect if he was a horse.”
Some other points:
--Adam’s unlikability. Lichtenberg comments that I have given myself an uphill battle in attempting to tell a story from the perspective of an unlikable character. My problem with this is I don’t think Adam’s unlikable. I never have. He is complicated, bitter, and drunk through much of the first part of the book, but I don’t believe him to be unlikable. Yet this is not the only place I have seen this comment, so I don’t know what more to say about it than “all right, but you still liked him enough to keep reading.”
(I discuss his apparent unlikability more in: http://genedoucette.me/2010/10/22/mary-sues-and-assholes/)
--Drinking. I thought the comment that Adam was unlikable specifically for enabling two college students by buying them alcohol was very telling. The implication being he’s buying for minors and that they would not have otherwise had access to alcohol. We are talking about COLLEGE here; this is a preposterous suggestion. There is also nothing in the text whereby Adam “keeps them drunk”, nor does he ply them with alcohol. He is not recklessly manipulating mortals into drinking with him; he’s drinking with mortals who are inclined to drink as well. As he says on multiple occasions, his preference is to hang out with bar drunks and college students. It’s a social thing.
A larger point would be that, again, this is a man who has lived an incredibly long time. It is only in the last hundred years or so that alcohol has developed a (deserved, I admit) stigma, and he was drunk for most of them and probably didn’t notice. In earlier times—one need not go back far at all, actually—drinking regularly and in large quantities was very common. His interest in drinking is perfectly in keeping with his character.
--Murder. It was hard to tell whether the “gritty realism” point was a critique or merely a comment, but I thought it worth pointing out that if one establishes a character that began life as an African tribesman sixty thousand years ago, one has to reconcile oneself with the fact that the character is a murderer. And again, look at the historical record of the human species: the remarkable thing is not that Adam has, can, and will commit murder to protect himself, but that he hold the lives of anyone other than himself to any degree of esteem. The idea that all life is sacred is a very new concept.
--The third act. I disagree with the suggestion that the switch from past tense to present tense is jarring and unnecessary. I think it’s fundamentally necessary if only for the obvious fact that the italicized sections at the beginning of each of the chapters in the rest of the book are all in present tense. More centrally, I find that the present tense makes the action in the final act much more palpable and direct. You already know, in every other part of the book, that Adam survives, because he’s telling the story from a safe distance. In present tense, while Adam is still narrating, some of that safety net is removed. It was something that began as a logical decision—because of the chapter pieces—that became what I consider a happy secondary result: a more gripping ending.
--Saving the cat. It should have been obvious to anyone reading the prologue—in which Adam recounts a time, eons ago, when he hunted and killed a large cat—that I’m thumbing my nose at this convention as well.
--Convoluted, expository lumps. I’m not really sure what to say about these comments. It’s a story about an immortal man told by an immortal man, with small historical tales nested inside of a larger present-day story arc. It’s not convoluted; Adam just has a lot to say.
Lichtenberg pointed out that there were things Adam talked about that she didn’t need to know, using the Egypt flashback as an example. The point of the novel was NOT to solve the overarching mystery of who is after Adam—which is revealed roughly the halfway point anyway—or necessarily even how he escapes. It is ONE point, but it is not THE point. THE point is, he’s an immortal man, he has some stories, and he’s sharing those stories. The Egypt passage was pertinent because it was on the subject of why he has trouble trusting women, and he’d just been put into a situation where he didn’t know if he could trust the woman he was sleeping with. It was a pertinent story, because it was a developing characteristic of Adam, and Adam IS the story. (And as a spoiler aside, the discussion of cultures revering men as gods is pertinent to Hellenic Immortal, the second book.)
In conclusion, I’d like to steal one of your points: look at the title. This book is called Immortal because it is about the immortal man telling the story. He may be complicated and some readers may not like him, but this is first and foremost a character study of someone who is, in my mind, an anthropomorphic representation of mankind. (And I mean man- not humankind.) The book has its digressions and its discursions, it may be messy at times, but it’s a compelling, interesting story that is difficult to put down.
So let me throw this back to Jacqueline Lichtenberg: in our past discussions you have lauded the idea of innovation and finding new ways to tell stories in fiction. You have been handed a book that ignores very nearly every convention yet manages to be addictively readable, and your response to this is to suggest what I think is a tired, conventional story I couldn’t even imagine WANTING to write. You clearly enjoyed the read. Why are you back-tracking?
----------END GENE DOUCETTE'S GUEST POST------------
Why am I "back-tracking?"
Of course, it doesn't seem that way to me. I would never do such a thing. I am all about the future, not the past.
You executed the "form" you chose for this novel perfectly (the pre-chapter inserts from captivity; the joining of the two plot threads.)
You applied that form expertly to the story you wanted to tell.
My judgment is (and there's a lot of taste involved in this) that the story you wanted to tell doesn't fit the form you chose. I see an artistic mis-match. The virtuoso performance of the writing art does not hide the major problem - passive hero, hung hero, lack of plot-movement.
I found the "couldn't put it down" appeal because I'm me, but I'm a very rare type of reader.
I judge that because of the artistic mismatch between form and story, the readership will be more limited than the story deserves.
I feel more people would be drawn to (reread and search for sequels) this character if the form matched the story artistically.
So to solve that problem which many beginning writers have and can't cover up the way you did, (and to demonstrate to writing students some points I've made previously) the writer either changes the form or the story -- or possibly both.
Switching the POV is one way to do that with dispatch and economy, to do it in a way that a commercial writer who is writing for profit (i.e. more than minimum wage) would prefer. But you can only do that way before you start to write, preferably before you "have the idea for the story."
Yes, of course shifting makes it a different story and changes the genre. In fact, that's a standard exercise in writing class - change genre by changing pov.
However, the book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote.
The "can't put it down" story for me was the story of the young girl utterly caught up in the "affairs of wizards" and falling in love with this Immortal guy. (title would still apply perfectly from her POV -- that's ALL she can see; that's become her whole life.)
That "become her whole life" effect is the core effect of Romance Genre.
From her point of view it's a Romance. If you're not a Romance fan, reader or writer, small wonder you don't think that would be interesting, or that the novel would be utterly unique in the anals of commercial fiction.
If I wrote this story about this Immortal guy from that young girl's point of view (and from her POV the other woman is an arch rival and a threat) there would be nothing, absolutely nothing, about the resulting novel that could be described as "tired" or "conventional." Ask my fans if they'd expect that it would be tired or conventional coming from my hand.
But of course if I wrote the novel, the Immortal guy would have a totally different character. So the novel I want to read is the one you would write from her point of view.
When one writer reads work by another writer, they rewrite it in their heads to be their own.
And the brutal fact is that all readers do that too, sometimes without knowing it.
The book the reader reads is not the book the writer wrote. I learned that from Marion Zimmer Bradley who always quoted it from one of her mentors, and I don't recall who (which irks me).
It's no doubt something her mentor learned from someone else. It's forever true.
Writers don't do the innovating in the storytelling field. Readers do.
So thank you for giving your readers a glimpse of the inner workings of your mind as you crafted the first book in this budding series, IMMORTAL.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Science Fiction readers, writers, collectors, and artists
Do you belong to this LinkedIn.com group?
Science Fiction readers, writers, collectors, and artists
This is a group for people that want to share their passion for Science Fiction in all its fashions and formats, with over 200 discussion topics Members are writers, readers, collectors, artists, movie makers, game makers, fans, and many more, all having many interesting and wide ranging discussions on the many fashions and formats of Science Fiction.(A link to this group on LinkedIn will be added in your message)
John Patrick asked an intriguing question on the Discussion forum, and so far has 74 replies on the subject of who would be willing to go to Mars to participate in a terraforming project.
It's a fascinating and informative conversation, in parts comparing an expedition to Mars by our descendants to the migration of the Pilgrim fathers to Ameica... at least on an emotional level.
However, there's also practical discussion of propellants, financing, and the need for a staging colony on the moon, and much more.
The idea of terraforming Mars presupposes that there is no one already on Mars to object to terraformation. But what if there were? One correspondent mourns the fact that we would make Mars the way we wanted it to be, and its natural magnificence would be lost. Someone else sees it as a sort of Ark, and would import humpback whales etc.
Another assumption that I have not seen challenged is that humans would remain human as colonists. Would we? I wonder whether my perceptions have been warped ever since my visit to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where I marveled at astronaut kidney stones. (They are really big!)
Would persons with large ureters adapt better? Would urinary incontinence be a desirable adaptation? That seems gross, not to mention unRomantic, but evolution is weird.
If weightlessness causes skulls to thicken, and other bones to dwindle (and excess calcium to accumulate in the body's filtration/excretion systems) --not that Mars is without gravity.
Equatorial surface gravity 3.711 m/s²[4]
0.376 g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars
And on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_gravity it is calculated that the surface gravity of Mars is
approximatelyI suspect that those who sign up to colonize distant planets, even within our solar system will have to be types who are not overly vain about their physical appearance. In Asimov's THE GODS THEMSELVES, the colonists who were born on our moon were unable to return to earth, owing to their brittle sketetons. Notwithstanding the ingenious ideas of those who would solve the problem the What-If-I-Don't-Like-It? crowd by developing a mothership that permanently orbits the Sun (like the Circle Line on the London Underground!), I think a ticket to Mars would be a one-way ticket.
times that of Earth.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
The World According to Dogs
I've just finished reading INSIDE OF A DOG, by Alexandra Horowitz. Subtitled "What Dogs See, Smell, and Know," this book with the Groucho Marx title aims to discover, as far as possible, what it's like to be a dog. Highly recommended! The author explores dogs' senses, consciousness, awareness of time, and communication, how much of our language they understand, their relations to other animals and to people, etc. I've always known, of course, that for dogs smell, not vision, is the dominant sense, but Horowitz's in-depth explanation of their olfactory capacities raised my awareness of what that dominance means. In effect, we and our dogs experience different worlds. Objects meaningful to us merit no attention at all from dogs, while we're oblivious to some sensory stimuli very important to them. With their perception of odors, dogs can effectively "see" the past. Their vision is different from ours, too, and not only because their eyes are closer to the ground. They have better peripheral vision than people but fuzzier focus in the center of the visual field. It's likely that they actually can't see an object directly under their paws without backing up a bit. And though they're not colorblind, they do see colors differently from us. A dog shows little interest in images on a TV screen, not only because the image lacks the crucial odor cues of a live animal, but also because of something called the flicker-fusion rate—the number of "snapshots" per minute the eyes can process separately. The human rate is around sixty, so a TV image or a modern film (but not a movie from the early days of cinema) looks like smooth, continuous movement to us. To a dog, with a flicker-fusion rate of seventy or eighty, the same film looks like a rapid series of static images. (This phenomenon might explain why our dog has never tried to chase cars but goes crazy when he sees a moving bicycle or baby stroller.)
The author constantly cautions us against anthropomorphizing our dogs, particularly by assuming an action or interaction means the same thing to the dog that it does to us. Also, she proposes that dogs evaluate objects in terms of their functionality—what's the thing good for? Meant to eat, chew, urinate on, lie on, play with? The canine view of the environment helps to explain why they prefer a human bed to a dog bed for sleeping.
When a dog saves a person from danger (e.g., fire, thin ice), does the pet "know" he has performed a heroic rescue? Horowitz describes an experiment that suggests dogs don't "know" when people are at risk and deliberately set out to save them. In this trial, people pretended to be hurt (e.g., by a bookcase falling on them), and their pets didn't seem especially concerned. As a commenter on Amazon pointed out, though, that's not a fair test. Dogs, with the acute senses Horowitz had already discussed in detail by this part of the book, could certainly tell when their owners were faking. And, if anecdotal evidence is of any value, I've noticed occasions when dogs act "worried" about people's unusual behavior even if no real danger or injury is involved, so they don't all react like the pets in the experiment. If someone lies motionless on the floor, our St. Bernard certainly acts as if he's trying to figure out what's wrong.
Does a dog know when he's been "bad"? Horowitz convincingly demonstrates that what a "guilty" dog is reacting to is anticipation of the owner's wrath, not awareness of having misbehaved.
Read the book yourself to enjoy the multifaceted dimensions of dog behavior this author delves into. Her style is a pleasure to read, and she mixes solid information with entertaining anecdotes about her own pet. I finished the book with a feeling of amazement at how a creature so different from us in numerous ways can share our lives so compatibly. As far as communication with aliens is concerned, many of us already have friendly aliens living in our houses.
On the other hand, for even more alien aliens-in-residence, consider my favorite animal, the cat. Unlike dogs, they're not naturally gregarious animals like us, so the gulf between our world views must be wider. For all I know, our cat may regard us the way Garfield does his "owner": "Ah, the man who cleans my litter box."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
The author constantly cautions us against anthropomorphizing our dogs, particularly by assuming an action or interaction means the same thing to the dog that it does to us. Also, she proposes that dogs evaluate objects in terms of their functionality—what's the thing good for? Meant to eat, chew, urinate on, lie on, play with? The canine view of the environment helps to explain why they prefer a human bed to a dog bed for sleeping.
When a dog saves a person from danger (e.g., fire, thin ice), does the pet "know" he has performed a heroic rescue? Horowitz describes an experiment that suggests dogs don't "know" when people are at risk and deliberately set out to save them. In this trial, people pretended to be hurt (e.g., by a bookcase falling on them), and their pets didn't seem especially concerned. As a commenter on Amazon pointed out, though, that's not a fair test. Dogs, with the acute senses Horowitz had already discussed in detail by this part of the book, could certainly tell when their owners were faking. And, if anecdotal evidence is of any value, I've noticed occasions when dogs act "worried" about people's unusual behavior even if no real danger or injury is involved, so they don't all react like the pets in the experiment. If someone lies motionless on the floor, our St. Bernard certainly acts as if he's trying to figure out what's wrong.
Does a dog know when he's been "bad"? Horowitz convincingly demonstrates that what a "guilty" dog is reacting to is anticipation of the owner's wrath, not awareness of having misbehaved.
Read the book yourself to enjoy the multifaceted dimensions of dog behavior this author delves into. Her style is a pleasure to read, and she mixes solid information with entertaining anecdotes about her own pet. I finished the book with a feeling of amazement at how a creature so different from us in numerous ways can share our lives so compatibly. As far as communication with aliens is concerned, many of us already have friendly aliens living in our houses.
On the other hand, for even more alien aliens-in-residence, consider my favorite animal, the cat. Unlike dogs, they're not naturally gregarious animals like us, so the gulf between our world views must be wider. For all I know, our cat may regard us the way Garfield does his "owner": "Ah, the man who cleans my litter box."
Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Constructing The Opening Of Action Romance
Story openings are difficult to construct and even harder to troubleshoot once constructed.
Information must be coded, compact, subtle, "off the nose" and at the same time explain to a totally disinterested reader why they should read (or viewer why they should view) this story.
I've discussed openings and how to construct them in the context of many other posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com -- posts on theme, character, plot, and the other working parts of story.
Here's some posts on structure which reference the skills of constructing an opening.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-proofing-steps-for-quality-writing.html
And here's one on first chapters by Linnea Sinclair
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/first-chapter-foibles.html
And my usage of the words "story" and "plot" just to be clear about that. Theme is what glues them together.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
If you've been trying to apply these techniques, I now have a really great example to illustrate them.
Here is the novel IMMORTAL by Gene Doucette - a writer I met via twitter and #scifichat #scriptchat and others.
Immortal
The structural issues make this a very borderline book, and it may not make it into my professional review column for that reason alone. However, there is a compelling resonance here that makes this a "can't put it down" read.
The structural issues that are a put-off for me might well be the real source of interest to others. Structure is not absolute. There are elements of taste involved.
So I have to say that the structure chosen to tell this story seems unnecessarily involuted to me. It's too complex for the material.
What is this structure?
The first-person narrative does hold to the POV of first person (an Immortal born so long ago language was only grunts). So I have no complaints there.
The structure is clever.
Each chapter is introduced by a few paragraphs set in italics that are happening while the main character is a prisoner (hung hero) in a laboratory setting where they are obviously investigating his immortality and immune system.
If the novel were told starting with his capture and going through his escape attempts until he succeeded, it would be a drag, long, boring hung-hero dealing with distractions rather than advancing the plot.
The plot is not about him escaping prison.
The actual narrative tells the story of this Immortal discovering that someone is after him.
This "someone" is rich and powerful and hires "demons" as hit men tasked with taking him alive.
Other people, though, die all around him.
So the straight-through plot is this Immortal being chased by humans, hit-men, demons, (actually some online gamers being used as dupes) and there are vampires, and a female who may be as old as he is (or older) he isn't sure. There's another woman involved, too, so you have a sort of "triangle" situation which isn't made clear even at the end of this volume. But the ending leaves us eager to read the next installment in this guy's Relationship problem.
He's been playing tag with this Immortal woman for millennia. (I told you this is good stuff.) And in the end of this novel, he learns some things about her, and his Relationship to the woman he meets in this novel changes substantially -- so the plot is advanced and there is a solid "ending" leading to a sequel.
At JUST THE RIGHT POINT (I told you the structure is well done for what it is) we get to the event where he gets captured at just the point where he hatches a successful escape attempt.
All the elements (characters and tools) to create this escape have been properly introduced in prior scenes. The possibility that he can die permanently has been made real.
So what's "wrong" here? This plot rumbles along like a well oiled machine. Why is it a chore to read? This is a good writer with a solid track record. What happened here?
There are 2 very abstract technical problems with this absolutely fascinating novel (don't worry, there's a sequel in the works that'll be better).
#1) The point in time chosen for Chapter One is wrong.
#2) The innate "character" of this character may be either badly presented or actually formulated wrong.
OK, let's start with #1 because that's easy to fix once you understand why it doesn't work.
------SPOILER ALERT -----
As often stated in this blog, I don't believe a good story can be "spoiled" by knowing what's going to happen in it. If it can, it's not a good book. If you understand that, read on fearlessly. You'll still love reading this book. In fact you may love it more after reading this discussion.
The first characters introduced after the main character wakes up out of a drunken stupor end up dead right away.
It is established that this dissipated and dis-likeable main character telling the story actually holds this pair of unlikeable college men in some affection -- mostly because they enjoy getting drunk and watching ballgames on TV with him.
This is a portrayal of college students that does not "work" for me.
What rule is violated by this portrayal?
Many 1940's SF novels elevate and laud drunkenness as a means to accessing higher consciousness or even one's innate intellectual skills. I used to like those novels. I know too much now to find such an attitude laudable.
Opening a story with a guy (apparently homeless bum) crashing in a college student's apartment and supplying beer and liquor to keep them drunk just doesn't work for me. I feel no sense of identification with this main character and couldn't care less what happens to him.
The information fed into the story-line by this opening situation is that this guy is not homeless, not poor, is capable of affection for these young men, and is -- ta-da! Immortal.
He ended up in the apartment having been brought there to a party by a friend (not-human not-magical iifrit) who also plays dissipated drunk convincingly. That friend later returns to move the plot forward, solidly and convincingly.
So I don't like this immortal character because he gets humans (who can be harmed by drunkeness) drunk while he drinks to a stupor but can't be harmed by it. He stays drunk for centuries just for the fun of it.
We see a portrait of an individual blessed with long life, not invulnerable but Immortal (so far).
I dealt with this problem of being immortal among mortals in my Dushau Trilogy, but my immortals there were aliens (I do vampires in other universes such as Those Of My Blood.)
Dushau (Dushau Trilogy)
My Dushau Immortals studiously avoid close personal relationships with mortals because they have perfect memories and too many bereavements can lead to insanity.
Doucette saw this problem as well, but handles it differently and with some intriguing twists.
In the course of the opening set-up chapters of this novel, we see this Immortal experience affection and friendship for a number of humans. His heart opens and he bonds easily with all and sundry (even vampires).
This makes him, to me, an irresistible character. Could not put this book down.
But at the same time, there's the "gritty realism" that this character has murdered -- over thousands of years, for many reasons, causing death has become no great big deal. And we see him murder mercilessly. Maybe with some justice, but with a callous attitude.
Now here we come to the Information Feed issue.
Go back to SAVE THE CAT! (the 3 books by Blake Snyder on screenwriting).
Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
What does the title say?
To engage your viewer INTO bonding with the main character whose story you are about to tell, you MUST first reveal something about him that will arouse viewer sympathy, empathy, identification or a yearning to become "like that."
The first thing we learn about the dingiest, dirty-harry character you want to present has to be LAUDABLE, universally laudable.
So Blake Snyder says -- show your hero SAVING THE CAT. Taking a risk for the helpless, or otherwise revealing an admirable character trait BEFORE you reveal the gritty traits that make the 6 problems the character has to solve.
Nothing in the introduction to Doucette's Immortal is in any way "saving the cat" -- drunkenness itself which is not a real PROBLEM for the Immortal but which harms those humans he associates with is not laudable. Bumming around among college parties with an Iffrit with dissipated habits is not laudable. That this is done by choice because he has nothing else to do is cause for reader disinterest.
So, while there are many traits about this Immortal character that are absolute grabbers, what we learn first are put-offs.
The put-offs will eventually become the problems that establishing Relationships will solve.
But as depicted in the opening, this Immortal has no conflict (internal or external) in forming friendships.
The first real plot event is the news that the college students who hosted him have been murdered by a demon -- and the assumption that the demon had been aiming at the Immortal while the college students just got in the way.
The structural problem with this plot event is simply that the Immortal was not in the apartment when the demon killed the students. The event happened off stage.
The Immortal actually feels a little sad and maybe miffed that the humans he felt affection for (briefly, in passing, without depth) had been murdered because of his presence in the apartment.
If not for that feeling, he'd have just blown town. But the murder of the humans made it more personal. He wants to fight back.
So from there on, the story gets interesting. The plot advances, and you begin to see where things are going with the bits at the beginning of chapters showing he's going to be captured.
The next structural innovation that is unnecessarily complicated is a shift in the narrative voice at the point where the two narratives (the chapter headings during captivity and the chapters leading up to being captured) come together. The standard first-person past narrative suddenly becomes first person present.
This is unnecessarily jarring, a real put-off.
In a different sort of story, it wouldn't be a put-off.
In fact, the entire structure could be the best artistic choice for some stories. Stories that involve say, time-travel, could work this way. Or stories about known historical events -- a King Arthur legend, The French Revolution, etc.
But in this particular narrative, the device seems like an erroneous choice because the material itself is strong enough to carry the reader straight through the plot.
So what we seem to have is a story-concept, a very intriguing character, that needed introducing to a readership.
There is a huge over-burden of background to work in. This character is 10's of thousands of years old and his development as a human being has direct relevance to how he relates to the modern century. He admits that at first his people were barely self-aware. He still has long-distance running skills from running down game for days at a time. He has trouble relating what happened to him in his life to the various calendars that have come and gone.
There's a lot of background to work in. A lot of information to feed.
The Immortal's story is being picked up when two women come into his life and that changes things significantly. But that means the story has to portray how things were for him "before" so that how things become "now" and will be "after" these relationships start to affect him.
How can you plot that when it's all information feed.
How can you avoid expository lumps?
The story and the plot are totally stationary in this Immortal's life all through this novel.
He's a "hung hero" on two levels -- being captured and imprisoned to be studied, and being chased down to be captured but he doesn't know by whom or why until the last third of the novel.
So the author cleverly structured the two stories against each other to give the illusion of movement.
Without the headings at the beginnings of chapters, we wouldn't anticipate him being imprisoned or why or how hard it would be to escape. It's foreshadowing by expository lump, cleverly translated into show-don't-tell (yes the chapter headings read very well, no mistakes there).
Without the story of his being chased down and captured, the story of escaping from prison wouldn't carry the novel.
So given that you have this terrific character with a huge exposition needed to introduce him, and NOTHING HAPPENING in his life to make a story, what do you do?
The solution to clever-up the structure is actually a work of genius.
But for me it just doesn't "work" because the story there is to tell about this Immortal does not require artsy-craftsy tricks of structure.
This Immortal's story actually begins when he meets the woman who will change his life, his self-concept, cause him to become involved in the modern world, in humanity and humanity's future by using all his past experience in the service of a greater good.
For any man, that change is always caused by a MATE - a SOUL-MATE (for most it's female, but not always).
The element is LOVE. The journey is from today's misery to "happily ever after."
When that story starts to move, the novel begins. All the rest is throat-clearing.
The story starts where the two elements that will conflict first come together.
So for this Immortal, that point is where he meets this human woman who will become significant forevermore.
But the story of his being captured and escaping is an incident, an excuse for action scenes, not the story, not the path to resolving the conflict.
Taking Blake Snyder's advice, the story starts where SHE sees HIM "save the cat" -- i.e. do something that endears him to her, that makes her willing to RISK something to save him.
Do you see where this is headed?
We have a classic PASSIVE HERO - he fights, he takes action, but his decisions do not actually make a real difference. This very clever, very skilled author has hidden this salient fact under some virtuoso writing, but the fact itself spoils everything in this novel.
What do you do to solve a PASSIVE HERO problem? What do you do to avoid expository lumps? What do you do to find a new opening for the novel that does not focus on a hung-hero who can't do anything about his problems and about whom the only important facts are odious to the very readers who would most enjoy the novel?
The solution is excrutiatingly simple. Think hard. It is a tried and true classic any seasoned editor would toss at a writer who sent in a chapter and outline like this. Why is this writer fumbling to tell this story when he obviously knows how to write novels?
See my 7 part series here on editing -- here's the 7th which has a list of links to the previous parts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
Now, think-think-think.
If you've read the novel now, you may see the obvious solution.
This whole thing is not the Immortal's story.
The expository lumps cleverly avoided by having the first person narrative allude to events in past millennia (a literary device that works) are filled with information we don't need to be TOLD -- on the nose.
And though these allusions are cleverly phrased to appear incidental, they are "on the nose" data-dumps. The data is mostly irrelevant to the Immortal's story.
How do you avoid that? What do you change?
I loved reading this Immortal's "voice" -- but that didn't change the fact that the expository lumps disguised as clever narrative that carried characterization just don't "work."
Why don't they "work?" Because the information in each memory is not something I wanted to know before I read it. No suspense. No revelation. I didn't have to work for it. I wasn't asking the question "what happened to this guy in Egypt?" I didn't NEED TO KNOW in order to solve the mystery of who's after him.
Because of that I didn't care who was after him or why. He felt it was ho-hum, being chased another time -- yawn. So it bored me.
At the opening, in the college student's apartment, this Immortal wakes up from a drunken stupor.
If ever you are tempted to start a story (and yes, I've done it!) with the main character "waking up" in some improbable circumstance or confused -- STOP WRITING and go back to the drawing board. Something is wrong conceptually with the structure or the character.
The story opens where the two elements that will conflict to generate the conflict which will be resolved in the last chapter first come together.
What happens in the last chapter of this novel?
The woman the Immortal meets pretty well into this novel finally gets what she wants, positions herself where she wants to be.
The Immortal succeeds in achieving NOT ONE THING that he SET OUT TO ACHIEVE in the opening. He wasn't either setting out or achieving. He was stationary in his life when SOMETHING HAPPENS TO HIM.
The two types of plot that go with this kind of material are:
1) Johnny gets his fanny caught in a bear trap and has his adventures getting it out
2) A likeable hero struggles against seemingly overwhelming odds toward a worthwhile goal.
In the opening to this novel, the Immortal does not DO ANYTHING, decide anything, take any action, learn anything, or even pray for anything that CAUSES anything else to happen.
Thus the Immortal (Johnny) does not GET his own fanny caught. That is he does not take an action that initiates a because-line.
In this novel the Immortal is not introduced by any trait that is even remotely likeable by any substantial audience-demographic. He is by any measure no hero and most importantly, he has no goal.
All of these fatal flaws are totally hidden by the superb writing craftsmanship.
And hereby hangs a cautionary tale.
When you are writing a story that has hold of you by the guts, a story you just have to get others to read, a compelling story -- and you find that you have to HIDE THE FLAWS, then STOP RIGHT THERE and go back to the drawing board.
Readers may not know how to tell you what's wrong, but they will sense something wrong and many of the very readers who should read the book just won't finish it.
Don't use your skills to hide flaws. Use them to eliminate the flaws.
The flaw in the novel IMMORTAL by Gene Doucette is the very most common flaw I see in manuscripts (and even published novels in Mass Market), and I see the very readers who would enjoy the novel most putting it aside.
It's a simple flaw and it's easy to fix. You know it's there when you face pages of utterly essential expository lumps.
YOU ARE TELLING THE STORY FROM THE WRONG POINT OF VIEW.
Now re-imagine this novel, IMMORTAL, from the woman's point of view.
She is the online gamer. She has an eclectic education, a vast imagination, an embracing nature. Her story starts when she gets the first inkling that such a thing as "an Immortal male" exists.
Her goal, which she pursues as relentlessly as the Immortal once ran down game animals, is to meet a living Immortal man.
When she meets him, her GOAL shifts to getting him into bed.
Her goal shifts when her heart opens to embrace this Immortal as a person, not just an icon.
Her goal shifts again when she realizes she wants this guy, she wants to be with him.
And that final goal, at the end of this novel, seems to have been achieved.
She is the one whose life changes, by her own actions, by her own determination, by her own will, by her own heroism. And that change is a WORTHWHILE GOAL that can be achieved only over SEEMINGLY OVERWHELMING ODDS.
She is the likeable hero who struggles against seemingly overwhelming odds toward a worthwhile goal - one she only sees dimly when she takes that first, fateful, step.
This novel is her story.
Here is a marvelous post by Linnea Sinclair on Point of View.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/heading-into-danger-choosing-point-of.html
Now from within her point of view, FINDING OUT, or discovering, or unfolding, or digging up the information about how The Immortal interacted with the ancient past, what his opinion of it is, and any relevant detail of his past experiences, becomes the main story-imperative.
As we sink into her point of view, we adopt her urgent need to know, and feel sparks of triumph every time we worm some new tidbit out of the Immortal.
All the expository lumps disappear and we learn his story through her eyes. What we don't know becomes spice, incense, and erotic triggers.
Saving him from the laboratory (which she does very cleverly) becomes the plot which culminates in conflict resolved and if not an HEA at least an "off into the sunset" ending leading to a sequel where we chase the HEA which is now suddenly possible - but maybe not going to happen.
So this opening novel, the introduction to the Immortal as a character, is not his story because his life is static at that point.
Yet through her eyes, we can enter into his life, understand what makes him tick better than he does himself, and see what he needs to do to learn what he must learn in order to change and grow, i.e. to be alive in a real sense, not just immortal.
Sometimes a character's story can be more compelling, more dramatic, easier to write and easier to read when that character's story is seen from outside. Remember Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
Always turn your material around and around, looking at it through the eyes of various characters before writing.
Notice here the power of THE OUTLINE. Given an outline of the plot, it would be immediately clear that the ending does not match the beginning and the middle doesn't hit the right "mid-point" tension note.
Once you see that the ending happens where one character achieves a goal, and the other character acquires a goal, you will know where the story starts.
Maybe you'll read this book and totally disagree because the character revealed in the smart-ass inner dialogue is just too interesting to lose by switching points of view.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
ps: in a few weeks we'll walk through the step-by-step process of stitching all these disparate techniques together and invent a world bursting with story-potential. That'll be at least a 7-part series of posts.
Information must be coded, compact, subtle, "off the nose" and at the same time explain to a totally disinterested reader why they should read (or viewer why they should view) this story.
I've discussed openings and how to construct them in the context of many other posts on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com -- posts on theme, character, plot, and the other working parts of story.
Here's some posts on structure which reference the skills of constructing an opening.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/7-proofing-steps-for-quality-writing.html
And here's one on first chapters by Linnea Sinclair
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/03/first-chapter-foibles.html
And my usage of the words "story" and "plot" just to be clear about that. Theme is what glues them together.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html
If you've been trying to apply these techniques, I now have a really great example to illustrate them.
Here is the novel IMMORTAL by Gene Doucette - a writer I met via twitter and #scifichat #scriptchat and others.
Immortal
The structural issues make this a very borderline book, and it may not make it into my professional review column for that reason alone. However, there is a compelling resonance here that makes this a "can't put it down" read.
The structural issues that are a put-off for me might well be the real source of interest to others. Structure is not absolute. There are elements of taste involved.
So I have to say that the structure chosen to tell this story seems unnecessarily involuted to me. It's too complex for the material.
What is this structure?
The first-person narrative does hold to the POV of first person (an Immortal born so long ago language was only grunts). So I have no complaints there.
The structure is clever.
Each chapter is introduced by a few paragraphs set in italics that are happening while the main character is a prisoner (hung hero) in a laboratory setting where they are obviously investigating his immortality and immune system.
If the novel were told starting with his capture and going through his escape attempts until he succeeded, it would be a drag, long, boring hung-hero dealing with distractions rather than advancing the plot.
The plot is not about him escaping prison.
The actual narrative tells the story of this Immortal discovering that someone is after him.
This "someone" is rich and powerful and hires "demons" as hit men tasked with taking him alive.
Other people, though, die all around him.
So the straight-through plot is this Immortal being chased by humans, hit-men, demons, (actually some online gamers being used as dupes) and there are vampires, and a female who may be as old as he is (or older) he isn't sure. There's another woman involved, too, so you have a sort of "triangle" situation which isn't made clear even at the end of this volume. But the ending leaves us eager to read the next installment in this guy's Relationship problem.
He's been playing tag with this Immortal woman for millennia. (I told you this is good stuff.) And in the end of this novel, he learns some things about her, and his Relationship to the woman he meets in this novel changes substantially -- so the plot is advanced and there is a solid "ending" leading to a sequel.
At JUST THE RIGHT POINT (I told you the structure is well done for what it is) we get to the event where he gets captured at just the point where he hatches a successful escape attempt.
All the elements (characters and tools) to create this escape have been properly introduced in prior scenes. The possibility that he can die permanently has been made real.
So what's "wrong" here? This plot rumbles along like a well oiled machine. Why is it a chore to read? This is a good writer with a solid track record. What happened here?
There are 2 very abstract technical problems with this absolutely fascinating novel (don't worry, there's a sequel in the works that'll be better).
#1) The point in time chosen for Chapter One is wrong.
#2) The innate "character" of this character may be either badly presented or actually formulated wrong.
OK, let's start with #1 because that's easy to fix once you understand why it doesn't work.
------SPOILER ALERT -----
As often stated in this blog, I don't believe a good story can be "spoiled" by knowing what's going to happen in it. If it can, it's not a good book. If you understand that, read on fearlessly. You'll still love reading this book. In fact you may love it more after reading this discussion.
The first characters introduced after the main character wakes up out of a drunken stupor end up dead right away.
It is established that this dissipated and dis-likeable main character telling the story actually holds this pair of unlikeable college men in some affection -- mostly because they enjoy getting drunk and watching ballgames on TV with him.
This is a portrayal of college students that does not "work" for me.
What rule is violated by this portrayal?
Many 1940's SF novels elevate and laud drunkenness as a means to accessing higher consciousness or even one's innate intellectual skills. I used to like those novels. I know too much now to find such an attitude laudable.
Opening a story with a guy (apparently homeless bum) crashing in a college student's apartment and supplying beer and liquor to keep them drunk just doesn't work for me. I feel no sense of identification with this main character and couldn't care less what happens to him.
The information fed into the story-line by this opening situation is that this guy is not homeless, not poor, is capable of affection for these young men, and is -- ta-da! Immortal.
He ended up in the apartment having been brought there to a party by a friend (not-human not-magical iifrit) who also plays dissipated drunk convincingly. That friend later returns to move the plot forward, solidly and convincingly.
So I don't like this immortal character because he gets humans (who can be harmed by drunkeness) drunk while he drinks to a stupor but can't be harmed by it. He stays drunk for centuries just for the fun of it.
We see a portrait of an individual blessed with long life, not invulnerable but Immortal (so far).
I dealt with this problem of being immortal among mortals in my Dushau Trilogy, but my immortals there were aliens (I do vampires in other universes such as Those Of My Blood.)
Dushau (Dushau Trilogy)
My Dushau Immortals studiously avoid close personal relationships with mortals because they have perfect memories and too many bereavements can lead to insanity.
Doucette saw this problem as well, but handles it differently and with some intriguing twists.
In the course of the opening set-up chapters of this novel, we see this Immortal experience affection and friendship for a number of humans. His heart opens and he bonds easily with all and sundry (even vampires).
This makes him, to me, an irresistible character. Could not put this book down.
But at the same time, there's the "gritty realism" that this character has murdered -- over thousands of years, for many reasons, causing death has become no great big deal. And we see him murder mercilessly. Maybe with some justice, but with a callous attitude.
Now here we come to the Information Feed issue.
Go back to SAVE THE CAT! (the 3 books by Blake Snyder on screenwriting).
Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
What does the title say?
To engage your viewer INTO bonding with the main character whose story you are about to tell, you MUST first reveal something about him that will arouse viewer sympathy, empathy, identification or a yearning to become "like that."
The first thing we learn about the dingiest, dirty-harry character you want to present has to be LAUDABLE, universally laudable.
So Blake Snyder says -- show your hero SAVING THE CAT. Taking a risk for the helpless, or otherwise revealing an admirable character trait BEFORE you reveal the gritty traits that make the 6 problems the character has to solve.
Nothing in the introduction to Doucette's Immortal is in any way "saving the cat" -- drunkenness itself which is not a real PROBLEM for the Immortal but which harms those humans he associates with is not laudable. Bumming around among college parties with an Iffrit with dissipated habits is not laudable. That this is done by choice because he has nothing else to do is cause for reader disinterest.
So, while there are many traits about this Immortal character that are absolute grabbers, what we learn first are put-offs.
The put-offs will eventually become the problems that establishing Relationships will solve.
But as depicted in the opening, this Immortal has no conflict (internal or external) in forming friendships.
The first real plot event is the news that the college students who hosted him have been murdered by a demon -- and the assumption that the demon had been aiming at the Immortal while the college students just got in the way.
The structural problem with this plot event is simply that the Immortal was not in the apartment when the demon killed the students. The event happened off stage.
The Immortal actually feels a little sad and maybe miffed that the humans he felt affection for (briefly, in passing, without depth) had been murdered because of his presence in the apartment.
If not for that feeling, he'd have just blown town. But the murder of the humans made it more personal. He wants to fight back.
So from there on, the story gets interesting. The plot advances, and you begin to see where things are going with the bits at the beginning of chapters showing he's going to be captured.
The next structural innovation that is unnecessarily complicated is a shift in the narrative voice at the point where the two narratives (the chapter headings during captivity and the chapters leading up to being captured) come together. The standard first-person past narrative suddenly becomes first person present.
This is unnecessarily jarring, a real put-off.
In a different sort of story, it wouldn't be a put-off.
In fact, the entire structure could be the best artistic choice for some stories. Stories that involve say, time-travel, could work this way. Or stories about known historical events -- a King Arthur legend, The French Revolution, etc.
But in this particular narrative, the device seems like an erroneous choice because the material itself is strong enough to carry the reader straight through the plot.
So what we seem to have is a story-concept, a very intriguing character, that needed introducing to a readership.
There is a huge over-burden of background to work in. This character is 10's of thousands of years old and his development as a human being has direct relevance to how he relates to the modern century. He admits that at first his people were barely self-aware. He still has long-distance running skills from running down game for days at a time. He has trouble relating what happened to him in his life to the various calendars that have come and gone.
There's a lot of background to work in. A lot of information to feed.
The Immortal's story is being picked up when two women come into his life and that changes things significantly. But that means the story has to portray how things were for him "before" so that how things become "now" and will be "after" these relationships start to affect him.
How can you plot that when it's all information feed.
How can you avoid expository lumps?
The story and the plot are totally stationary in this Immortal's life all through this novel.
He's a "hung hero" on two levels -- being captured and imprisoned to be studied, and being chased down to be captured but he doesn't know by whom or why until the last third of the novel.
So the author cleverly structured the two stories against each other to give the illusion of movement.
Without the headings at the beginnings of chapters, we wouldn't anticipate him being imprisoned or why or how hard it would be to escape. It's foreshadowing by expository lump, cleverly translated into show-don't-tell (yes the chapter headings read very well, no mistakes there).
Without the story of his being chased down and captured, the story of escaping from prison wouldn't carry the novel.
So given that you have this terrific character with a huge exposition needed to introduce him, and NOTHING HAPPENING in his life to make a story, what do you do?
The solution to clever-up the structure is actually a work of genius.
But for me it just doesn't "work" because the story there is to tell about this Immortal does not require artsy-craftsy tricks of structure.
This Immortal's story actually begins when he meets the woman who will change his life, his self-concept, cause him to become involved in the modern world, in humanity and humanity's future by using all his past experience in the service of a greater good.
For any man, that change is always caused by a MATE - a SOUL-MATE (for most it's female, but not always).
The element is LOVE. The journey is from today's misery to "happily ever after."
When that story starts to move, the novel begins. All the rest is throat-clearing.
The story starts where the two elements that will conflict first come together.
So for this Immortal, that point is where he meets this human woman who will become significant forevermore.
But the story of his being captured and escaping is an incident, an excuse for action scenes, not the story, not the path to resolving the conflict.
Taking Blake Snyder's advice, the story starts where SHE sees HIM "save the cat" -- i.e. do something that endears him to her, that makes her willing to RISK something to save him.
Do you see where this is headed?
We have a classic PASSIVE HERO - he fights, he takes action, but his decisions do not actually make a real difference. This very clever, very skilled author has hidden this salient fact under some virtuoso writing, but the fact itself spoils everything in this novel.
What do you do to solve a PASSIVE HERO problem? What do you do to avoid expository lumps? What do you do to find a new opening for the novel that does not focus on a hung-hero who can't do anything about his problems and about whom the only important facts are odious to the very readers who would most enjoy the novel?
The solution is excrutiatingly simple. Think hard. It is a tried and true classic any seasoned editor would toss at a writer who sent in a chapter and outline like this. Why is this writer fumbling to tell this story when he obviously knows how to write novels?
See my 7 part series here on editing -- here's the 7th which has a list of links to the previous parts:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/what-exactly-is-editing-part-vii-how-do.html
Now, think-think-think.
If you've read the novel now, you may see the obvious solution.
This whole thing is not the Immortal's story.
The expository lumps cleverly avoided by having the first person narrative allude to events in past millennia (a literary device that works) are filled with information we don't need to be TOLD -- on the nose.
And though these allusions are cleverly phrased to appear incidental, they are "on the nose" data-dumps. The data is mostly irrelevant to the Immortal's story.
How do you avoid that? What do you change?
I loved reading this Immortal's "voice" -- but that didn't change the fact that the expository lumps disguised as clever narrative that carried characterization just don't "work."
Why don't they "work?" Because the information in each memory is not something I wanted to know before I read it. No suspense. No revelation. I didn't have to work for it. I wasn't asking the question "what happened to this guy in Egypt?" I didn't NEED TO KNOW in order to solve the mystery of who's after him.
Because of that I didn't care who was after him or why. He felt it was ho-hum, being chased another time -- yawn. So it bored me.
At the opening, in the college student's apartment, this Immortal wakes up from a drunken stupor.
If ever you are tempted to start a story (and yes, I've done it!) with the main character "waking up" in some improbable circumstance or confused -- STOP WRITING and go back to the drawing board. Something is wrong conceptually with the structure or the character.
The story opens where the two elements that will conflict to generate the conflict which will be resolved in the last chapter first come together.
What happens in the last chapter of this novel?
The woman the Immortal meets pretty well into this novel finally gets what she wants, positions herself where she wants to be.
The Immortal succeeds in achieving NOT ONE THING that he SET OUT TO ACHIEVE in the opening. He wasn't either setting out or achieving. He was stationary in his life when SOMETHING HAPPENS TO HIM.
The two types of plot that go with this kind of material are:
1) Johnny gets his fanny caught in a bear trap and has his adventures getting it out
2) A likeable hero struggles against seemingly overwhelming odds toward a worthwhile goal.
In the opening to this novel, the Immortal does not DO ANYTHING, decide anything, take any action, learn anything, or even pray for anything that CAUSES anything else to happen.
Thus the Immortal (Johnny) does not GET his own fanny caught. That is he does not take an action that initiates a because-line.
In this novel the Immortal is not introduced by any trait that is even remotely likeable by any substantial audience-demographic. He is by any measure no hero and most importantly, he has no goal.
All of these fatal flaws are totally hidden by the superb writing craftsmanship.
And hereby hangs a cautionary tale.
When you are writing a story that has hold of you by the guts, a story you just have to get others to read, a compelling story -- and you find that you have to HIDE THE FLAWS, then STOP RIGHT THERE and go back to the drawing board.
Readers may not know how to tell you what's wrong, but they will sense something wrong and many of the very readers who should read the book just won't finish it.
Don't use your skills to hide flaws. Use them to eliminate the flaws.
The flaw in the novel IMMORTAL by Gene Doucette is the very most common flaw I see in manuscripts (and even published novels in Mass Market), and I see the very readers who would enjoy the novel most putting it aside.
It's a simple flaw and it's easy to fix. You know it's there when you face pages of utterly essential expository lumps.
YOU ARE TELLING THE STORY FROM THE WRONG POINT OF VIEW.
Now re-imagine this novel, IMMORTAL, from the woman's point of view.
She is the online gamer. She has an eclectic education, a vast imagination, an embracing nature. Her story starts when she gets the first inkling that such a thing as "an Immortal male" exists.
Her goal, which she pursues as relentlessly as the Immortal once ran down game animals, is to meet a living Immortal man.
When she meets him, her GOAL shifts to getting him into bed.
Her goal shifts when her heart opens to embrace this Immortal as a person, not just an icon.
Her goal shifts again when she realizes she wants this guy, she wants to be with him.
And that final goal, at the end of this novel, seems to have been achieved.
She is the one whose life changes, by her own actions, by her own determination, by her own will, by her own heroism. And that change is a WORTHWHILE GOAL that can be achieved only over SEEMINGLY OVERWHELMING ODDS.
She is the likeable hero who struggles against seemingly overwhelming odds toward a worthwhile goal - one she only sees dimly when she takes that first, fateful, step.
This novel is her story.
Here is a marvelous post by Linnea Sinclair on Point of View.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/heading-into-danger-choosing-point-of.html
Now from within her point of view, FINDING OUT, or discovering, or unfolding, or digging up the information about how The Immortal interacted with the ancient past, what his opinion of it is, and any relevant detail of his past experiences, becomes the main story-imperative.
As we sink into her point of view, we adopt her urgent need to know, and feel sparks of triumph every time we worm some new tidbit out of the Immortal.
All the expository lumps disappear and we learn his story through her eyes. What we don't know becomes spice, incense, and erotic triggers.
Saving him from the laboratory (which she does very cleverly) becomes the plot which culminates in conflict resolved and if not an HEA at least an "off into the sunset" ending leading to a sequel where we chase the HEA which is now suddenly possible - but maybe not going to happen.
So this opening novel, the introduction to the Immortal as a character, is not his story because his life is static at that point.
Yet through her eyes, we can enter into his life, understand what makes him tick better than he does himself, and see what he needs to do to learn what he must learn in order to change and grow, i.e. to be alive in a real sense, not just immortal.
Sometimes a character's story can be more compelling, more dramatic, easier to write and easier to read when that character's story is seen from outside. Remember Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.
Always turn your material around and around, looking at it through the eyes of various characters before writing.
Notice here the power of THE OUTLINE. Given an outline of the plot, it would be immediately clear that the ending does not match the beginning and the middle doesn't hit the right "mid-point" tension note.
Once you see that the ending happens where one character achieves a goal, and the other character acquires a goal, you will know where the story starts.
Maybe you'll read this book and totally disagree because the character revealed in the smart-ass inner dialogue is just too interesting to lose by switching points of view.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
ps: in a few weeks we'll walk through the step-by-step process of stitching all these disparate techniques together and invent a world bursting with story-potential. That'll be at least a 7-part series of posts.
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