Celebrating E-Books

Last week was Read an E-Book Week. This week is the annual EPICon, put on the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition. (I couldn’t make it there this year. Attending EPICon is hard for me because of the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, which starts Wednesday of the following week—two cons so close together are exhausting and expensive.):

EPICon

It’s amazing how the world of e-publishing has changed since the publication of my first e-book, vampire novel DARK CHANGELING, in 1999 (which won an Eppie Award from EPIC in the first year the awards were established), and the first EPICon, in 2000. E-books have advanced from an exotic fringe technology few people outside the industry understood to something everybody has at least heard of, in large part thanks to Kindle and Nook. Authors now have a wide-open market for niche works and writings of awkwardly small or large word count. Their backlists never have to “go out of print.” Writers’ organizations are beginning to unbend and recognize that substituting high royalty rates and frequent payouts for advances and skimpy royalty rates is not evil but is a valid alternative business model that many authors prefer. I’m proud to have been an early adopter of e-publishing.

DARK CHANGELING stars Roger Darvell, a psychiatrist suffering from a dark thirst and a very strange midlife crisis. It can be found here on Amazon.com:

Dark Changeling

Recently I have even ventured into the deeper waters of Kindle self-publication with the electronic release of DAYMARES FROM THE CRYPT, a little chapbook of supernatural verse I self-published on paper many years ago:

Daymares from the Crypt

When I left my day job in December, my co-workers surprised me with a cake based on that book cover. How cool was that?!

Daymares Cake

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Business Model of Writers In a changing World Part 2: Google+

This post is about the career (not at all atypical) of a powerful Science Fiction/Fantasy writer as it relates to the Business Cycle (one of those boring economics things we have to force ourselves to pay attention to.)

I know many such life stories (from many decades of publishing career-stories), but I want to share this one with you because this fellow's success was particularly well deserved -- yet the business cycle swamped him, too. 

Tobias S. Buckell on Amazon

There he is on Amazon. 

He hit the brick wall of 2008, and now he's BACK!!!  And he's using the tools I've been telling you about since 2007 -- Web 2.0, social networking, interactivity, and now crowd sourcing.  We live in a new world, and some writers will grab hold of it and leverage it to commercial success.

I found the link to his blog on Google+  -- a social network that's recently added Communities (as Facebook has Groups, and others have other ways to sub-set your connections.)

Here's the blog entry I found on Google+

http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2012/12/17/how-i-used-kickstarter-to-reboot-a-book-series-and-my-career-and-maybe-my-life/

https://plus.google.com/u/0/116892646782163010765/posts  is the fellow who posted the link on Google+ 

2008 is widely acknowledged as the time when the Housing Market crumbled, and the USA went into severe financial crisis right in the middle of a big Presidential Election.  Yeah, but it was all easily predictable by SF writers in 2006 and 2007 -- you didn't even need to follow financials to see it coming.  Book sales told the story, a "Leading Indicator" as they say. 

Here's a quote from Buckell's blog post:

----------Quote--------------
My first science fiction novel debuted in 2006. Crystal Rain was flavored with a science fiction stew of Caribbean refugees fled to a lost world, steampunk, a dangerous dreadlocked cyborg in a trench coat, and an ancient evil pressing down on our heroes. The first of my Xenowealth novels, it was followed by Ragamuffin in 2007 (a Nebula nominee), and Sly Mongoose in 2008. I was in my mid to late twenties. I wanted to write more. I wanted to grab the dream I had since I was 14 (and indeed in 2008, after much hustling, most of my money was coming from fiction and I was pretty much living the life I’d been striving toward).

The books didn’t do too well in chain bookstores, each time getting a smaller order. As we know from real estate: location location location. So each book sold less in bookstores. It was quite dramatic with the step between Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin (where a small buy-in from Wal-Mart even buoyed first time reader numbers, but was not repeated for following books). And yet…

…readers of the series compensated for the loss of chain bookstore placement by switching to ordering online off Amazon. Independent stores were still really nice to me (special shout out to Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, which always was responsible for moving the highest number of copies). Library orders still remained okay. Sales didn’t increase, but they weren’t dying. In fact, Sly Mongoose slightly grew in hardcover (it just came out in paperback this year after a 3 year delay, so those numbers are still trickling in). Tor had agreed to buy two more books in the series, giving me my planned 5 book series.

But I am nothing if not a realist. In later 2008, when I met my editor after seeing that Sly Mongoose was barely carried in any bookstores we had an honest discussion about the chances the 4th Xenowealth book would have. It would probably get even less bookstore placement, being harder for readers to stumble on. Based on the core, awesome, dedicated readers I already have, we guessed that it would do okay. Just like Sly Mongoose it would get enough readers to offset the loss in bookstore readers, and indies would help. But overall, I wouldn’t be growing sales much. Just ticking up slightly.

Some have wondered if my publisher killed the series. No. It was a mutual decision hashed out over a business lunch, the topic raised by me. My editor and I thought, hey, let’s change direction. I started working on a novel called Arctic Rising.
-------------END QUOTE------------

Now right after the end of that quote, Buckell tells of how life dealt him blow after blow -- a typical Pluto Transit situation but I don't know his natal chart, good things (wife pregnant with twins) and bad things (he had health disaster) along with a career wipe-out he attributes to health. 

And for him, that's true -- he might have leapt across the economic chasm of 2008 because he's that good a writer, but he got floored by a massive health problem while the rest of the world shattered.

As he came out of that long, dark tunnel a year later, he investigated self-publishing on Kindle -- but that route is chancy at best and he had a family to support.

Meanwhile, Kickstarter began to attract enough attention that his friends were telling him about it.  And in 2011, he launched into a Kickstarter project.

Now, go read how he researched Kickstarter.  There are a lot of "crowd-sourcing" websites operating now.  It's a trend.  But research - ah, that doesn't change.  Learn to do it for one kind of thing, and you know how to do it for everything, with only a few quirks to learn for each application.

Now I'm not expecting you to want to use a crowd-sourcing website for your Romance novel. 

Crowdsourcing works best for you if you already have a following or an "in" with a connected market, or a ready-made crowd to use as a source. 

But things like Google+ Communities are making crowds which will become "sources" -- imagine the world that capital raised this way will create.

It will be a different world than we've lived in -- some of the problems created by Big Business raising capital on Wall Street will go away, but other problems will be generated that we have to imagine and write about in Science Fiction Romance.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Writing Schedules

At the 2012 Darkover con, I took part in a panel on “how to make yourself write.” In that session I publicly announced my intention to commit myself to a regular writing schedule once I quit my day job. Well, as of December I’m “retired” (if it’s possible, technically, to retire from a part-time job), and I’ve started collecting Social Security. So, having committed myself, I’ve begun implementing my plan. Some notes on how it’s working out:

A while back, it dawned on me that at a rate of 1000 words a day, an author would complete the draft of a novella in a month and a standard-length novel in three months. It takes me about two hours, sometimes less, to churn out 1000 words. Even I, methodical and often downright sluggish as a writer, can force myself to write for two hours in a day, given an available chunk of time that size. Following that schedule, over the span of mid-January through mid-February I did produce a novella to submit to one of my publishers for a March 1 deadline.

One thing I discovered is that, in practice, I won’t be writing for two hours, seven days a week. Two of the weekdays are a little crowded, so my output on those turns out to average closer to 500 words. Also, Sunday afternoons typically have to be set aside for this weekly blog, my monthly blog for the VampChix site, and working on my monthly author newsletter. So I can complete a 20,000-word novella in about a month, but probably not a 30-000-word one. A full-length book would take closer to four months than three; however, my typical novel is closer to category length. Given enough viable plot concepts I could get excited about, I could produce a novel and two novellas (or two or three short stories), or more than two novellas and short pieces, per year with plenty of time for revision. Plus occasional travel and the inevitable down time between projects.

One of the other panelists at that Darkover session asked whether I counted other kinds of writing-related activities in the daily two-hour commitment: Revision? Editing? Outlining? Promotional activities? The mechanics of submitting to publishers? I waffled on that answer because I hadn’t thought about it before.

I’ve decided rewriting, editing, and galley proofing definitely count as legitimate activities for the “writing” slot of the day. The part of the outlining stage that’s done on the computer counts. The preliminary handwritten phases (e.g., rough notes on characters and plot points), I think, get done at other times of the day or week. Promotional stuff doesn’t apply against the two hours because promotion isn’t writing (any more than grocery shopping and paying bills are housekeeping, even though some people who give advice on managing household chores count them as such). Neither is correspondence with editors.

In addition to scheduling definite times for writing and my writing-related commitments (blogs and newsletter), I’ve resolved to do at least one promotion-related thing per week. I belong to a couple of lists specifically set up for sending out excerpts and announcements, yet weeks or months go by when I don’t post anything. Without a commitment to motivate myself, I easily “forget” to take advantage of such opportunities.

How do you “make yourself write”? What kind of schedule, if any, do you follow? I’m always interested in other writers’ working processes. Maybe somebody knows “the secret”!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Happily Ever After Life Patterns Part 2: The Cheating Woman

Part One with this title was posted in 2007,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/02/happily-ever-after.html

We've examined the practicalities and plausibilities of the HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending, the HEA, at considerable depth and from many angles. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/04/education-of-action-romance-hero.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-1.html

And here's a post with links to the previous 6 parts getting deep into this subject:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/big-love-sci-fi-part-vii-unconditional.html

What Does She See In Him -- the key question all Romance writers must keep firmly in mind when crafting the plot:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html

It remains that half or more of the USA population claims (sometimes bitterly) that they don't believe in Happily Ever After -- and have defaulted to "Happily for Now" - a term I've heard used in TV drama dialogue, it's so common.

It's a philosophy of life, like the irksome and extremely destructive fallacy which we've also discussed, "I'm doing all I can ..." 

What's the relationship between these two philosophies?  And what has that relationship to do with the growing commonality of the Cheating Woman and the popularity of a book I'll point you to below.

"I'm doing all I can ..." means I don't have to make any actual effort to accomplish anything -- I'm off the hook once I've just done what I already know how to do.

HAPPILY EVER AFTER -- the HEA ending -- requires heroism on the part of both people in the relationship. 

Heroism is doing MORE than you can.  Heroism is accomplishing the task regardless of your personal limits, regardless of what limits your environment, social custom, work-rules, etc. put on you -- regardless of any external force acting on you.

Once you have given your Word of Honor, you do what you said, regardless.

That's why giving a Word of Honor is an extremely rare and precious occasion.

Saying you will do something and then just not doing it because "I can't" corrodes the strength of your character -- and often has little effect on anyone else.

The Word of Honor is something that has likewise been suppressed in our current culture. 

I suspect you could make a case in a well written Romance story for the Word of Honor (Noblesse Oblige, too) being a component of most Religions (or mystical practices).  And the discarding of the Word of Honor may be a "baby and the bathwater" situation -- where we have scrubbed religion from public notice, but along with that eradicated all personal Honor.

That's what "I'm doing all I can" actually means -- it is a plea to regard your Honor as unsmirched because you have fulfilled your Word, despite the fact that the task is not accomplished.

If you can't quite grasp this, I recommend you read a few of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint Germain novels. 

So Happiness is actually a mental/emotional condition that originates inside your deepest Self where you find you are satisfied with your own performance.

You can't live "Happily Ever After" if inside yourself you find your personal structure disintegrating -- which it will if you don't keep your Word in all things all the time, regardless of whether you can or not.

Note that when you do something you can't do -- it becomes something you can. 

It changes you, inside and outside, when you accomplish a task that is beyond you at the moment you start out to do it.  So "I'm doing all I can" is a pledge to never change, never grow, never mature, never set a record, never raise the bar for all humanity.  That's a Word given -- and if you keep that Word, you will likely never achieve the HEA for yourself.   

The "I'm doing all I can" defense is a plea for another person to accept that your inner character is intact -- to try to prove to yourself that it actually is intact when you know for a fact that it is not intact.

Our culture has elevated "appearances" above "truth." 

If you induce others to acknowledge that you are blameless, then you can accept that you are.

Only it just does not work that way -- no matter what, we KNOW that coming up short of accomplishing what we've promised to accomplish (or been paid to accomplish in our jobs) is corroding our personal integrity as battery acid corrodes the contacts in a car until the car won't start.  The metal of the contacts crumbles, eaten by the acid -- and "doing all I can" then not persisting until the task is accomplished has an acidic byproduct that destroys the character's "contacts" with -- whatever it is that's "out there" and is the source of Love in the universe.   

When that contact stops working, the Love energy stops flowing. 

So that's the relationship between "Happily Ever After" and "Doing All I Can."  In a word: Love. 

Now, what has that to do with the cheating spouse?  In this case, I'm talking about the plot element The Cheating Wife.

I hope that this article is still available when you are reading this post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/13/why-i-cheated-on-my-husba_n_2240535.html

---------------QUOTE---------
According to the UK Adultery Survey 2012 by undercoverlovers.com, cheating women are more likely to stray as they are seeking emotional fulfillment, an improvement to their self-esteem and romance. When women cheat will depend on how fulfilled they feel in their marriages. But according to the survey, wives who cheat will do so five years into their marriages whereas men will do so seven years in.

After much soul-searching, I finally got to understand what drove me to cheat and why I had stepped into the shoes of cheating women:
-----------END QUOTE----------------

The article goes on to point at everything in life except what leaps out at me as the most obvious point.

It's all about "doing all I can" and the loss of the attitude that you don't keep your Word of Honor simply to the point where you CAN keep it -- you just keep it, regardless, no matter what. 

Why would anyone torment themselves with misery just to keep their Word of Honor? 

Look at the history of miserable marriages -- we've all read those Regency Romances, arranged marriages, marriages to way older men, and we know that legally grounds for Divorce can be phrased as "incompatibility."  That just means it's too miserable, I quit. 

In other words, marriage is temporary, and you can quit whenever you're not happy or have "done all you can" to make the other person happy.

Read that article, and maybe explore the book it's from -- it does make the point (vividly) that nobody can "make" you happy -- happiness does not come from outside.  Nor does misery. 

--------QUOTE-----------

Back then, I bought into the notion that because I wasn't happy, someone else could dish happiness up on a silver platter. As my ex husband was not able to, someone else could surely, right? This of course wasn't true and to this day, it still isn't. In fact, the whole ordeal stressed me out and exposed me to more confusion and unhappiness.

Lesson learned: Being part of the cheating women club, I understand now that running away from myself was not the answer and that I am responsible for my own happiness and fulfillment. My happiness is, under no circumstances, anybody else’s responsibility -- least of all whoever I am in a relationship with.

--------END QUOTE---------------

So this author has articulated the essential fact that the issue is inside the miserable person -- as shown by statistics changing husbands doesn't usually solve the problem in one go.  (It's something else when the husband cheats and leaves, that's usually his problem, and if you haven't noticed men are different from women in a couple of ways.)

And much of this ruminating (all of it fodder for novels!) is about finding, isolating, and solving that issue causing the misery, whatever it is.

But if you're looking to write that blockbuster novel or screenplay that just sweeps the nation and gives you immortal fame, you need to find the fallacies upon which this author is basing her thesis.

She sums up the thesis this way:

---------QUOTE---------------
All of these reasons may sound like excuses, and you know what? Cheating was a selfish act. I will be the first to admit it. I could have chosen not to do what I did, but if I put myself in the shoes of that young girl, at that time, I really felt that cheating was the solution.
--------END QUOTE------------

But she does not address the source of the "selfishness" -- or why "selfishness" is not a good thing, or what to replace it with.  She doesn't even define what selfishness is so that others can examine themselves internally and discover their own selfishness.

She notes that looking back, she can see her younger self was selfish.

How many people do you know who, while in the process of deploying "selfishness" throughout their lives (job, home, kids, fun, volunteering, charity events, social clubs like Masons, church) as a behavior principle actually call their motive "selfish?" 

How can you look at your own self (as the Main Character in your novel reveals to the reader their own inner self) -- and identify the "selfish" elements and judge them against an external, fixed, value system to discover how selfish they are?  This book does not appear to provide that clue. 



Pondering the fallacies in this author's thinking -- fallacies that make her non-fiction and inspirational speaking so popular -- will show you the fallacies within your reader's minds.

Armed with the inventory of fallacies your reader has never questioned, does not want to question, may actively snear at questioning, you can create characters to speak for all these points of view. 

Pit conflicting fallacies against each other via characters who have based their self-esteem on such fallacies, and you will have a story.  Look at the quotes I've extracted from the article above -- see how they tell a story?  They tell a STORY -- but do not constitute a PLOT.  You can tell that same story with a dozen different plots and found a writing career that will last a lifetime.  Really!  There are that many permutations and combinations to these fallacies! 

For more on Fallacy as a foundation for theme (which generates both story and plot) see the 6 part series of posts in January 2013 titled Theme-Plot Integration.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Bird Intelligence

Last week’s episode of the PBS series NATURE featured crows. The program revealed the high intelligence of these birds, possibly comparable in their own way to chimpanzees. For instance, crows not only shape and use tools, they can implement a multi-step problem-solving chain of actions, using one object to get another object, which they then use to obtain food. It has also been shown that crows somehow communicate with their offspring to teach the young birds to later avoid, in the absence of their elders, dangers they haven’t encountered before.

Among avians, some parrots have also been found to be much smarter than previously believed, able to respond appropriately to human language rather than just “parrot” it. They can obey verbal instructions and solve simple problems put to them in words. So much for the premise that near-human intelligence can’t fit into a small skull. Think of the implications for mentally enhanced dogs and cats or mythical diminutive humanoids such as leprechauns.

Off topic, as a footnote to the “weird sex” subject, here’s an article about cross-species rape and necrophilia by male sea otters in Monterey Bay. We used to enjoy watching them from the pier when we lived there—who would imagine such violent behavior from such “cute” animals?

Other Side of Otters

Which illustrates two facts: Many human sexual practices that have traditionally been called “perverted” and “unnatural” aren’t unnatural at all. And “natural” is not necessarily desirable.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Audiobook, e-book and other formats

Here's a little success story for the business model and story-structure crafting posts I've been showing you and the source material behind my narrative about the shifts in the publishing industry and in audiences. 

I now have books in new paper, e-book (multi-format, but I'm giving you links to Kindle), and now audiobook, too, along with whole new story/plotlines designed for a videogame. 

For most of very recent history, all writers have been self-employed or employed to do "work for hire" (i.e. paid a level salary to write words they subsequently do not own the copyright on.)

Prior to that writers, as most all artists, worked under the patronage system, and didn't actually own what they produced.  Rich people competed to own the most popular of them. 

Prior to that writers worked mostly anonymously -- bards singing epic songs glamorizing and immortalizing actual newsworthy historic events.

Today, even writers who own their copyrights and license them to publishers end up doing a lot of their own publicity.  But sometimes things just happen. 

"Just happen" seems to be the major theme of the epic tale of the Sime~Gen Universe novels in the last few years.

A few years ago, Wildside Press came to Jean Lorrah and me asking for reprint rights to our backlist.  Wildside picked up the entire Sime~Gen series that Jean and I collaborate on and own together. 

We had barely finished doing the formatting work on all 12 extant Sime~Gen novels than a fellow who knew Jean's work via a connection to her University job as a Professor of English came to us wanting game rights to her novels.  We didn't have exactly what he wanted, but pointed him to some of the unpublished Sime~Gen work posted online, and it hinted at what he wanted.

For the last 7 months or so, we've been working to create the Sime~Gen galactic civilization, and meanwhile the novels have begun to appear in audiobook from audible.com which is a handy format many of his game development  crew prefer -- because it's hands-and-eyes free and allows for multitasking. 

Amazon's cross indexing is a mess, what with all the used copies for sale (cheap), so for reference, I'm going to list the Sime~Gen novels in publication order with links to the various formats of the new editions. 

You don't need to read them before playing the game because the game will include whatever background you would want to play in this universe's interstellar era. 

The novels were published in an order that has little to do with the chronology of history in the Sime~Gen universe.  For that chronology consult:

http://simegen.com/CHRONO1.html

Sime~Gen Universe Novels:

House of Zeor.

    Wildside Press, Borgo, 2011, paperback, e-book

    Audible.com, 2012

New Paperback:


Kindle:


Audible.com
http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B007JX14EM

Unto Zeor, Forever (won the Galaxy Award)

        Wildside Press, Borgo, paperback, e-book 2011

          audible.com, 2012

New Paperback:



Kindle:



audible.com
http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00AHI6XI8

First Channel, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

        Wildside Press, 2011, paperback, e-book

New Paperback:



Kindle:


audible.com (?)


Mahogany Trinrose.

       Wildside Press, 2011, paperback, and e-book

New Paperback:


Kindle:


audible.com (?)


Channel's Destiny, by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

        Wildside Press, 2011 paperback, e-book

New Paperback:



Kindle:


audible.com (?)
    
RenSime,

   Wildside Press, Borgo, 2011 paperback, e-book

    audible.com, 2012

New Paperback:


Kindle:


audible.com  
 http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00AKNDHNE

Zelerod's Doom by Jacqueline Lichtenberg and Jean Lorrah

    Wildside Press, Borgo, 2011, paperback, e-book

 New Paperback


Kindle:


audible.com (?)


Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah (in Lichtenberg's series but not a collaboration)

        Wildside Press, Borgo, 2011, paperback, e-book

New Paperback:


Kindle:


audible.com (?)

To Kiss Or To Kill  Sime~Gen Book 11 by Jean Lorrah,

      Wildside Press, Borgo, 2011, paperback, e-book

       audible.com, 2012

 New Paperback:


Kindle:


audible.com
http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00AJWTWQC

The Story Untold and other Sime~Gen stories, Sime~Gen Book 10 by Jean Lorrah,

      Wildside Press 2010, paperback, e-book

      audible.com, 2012

New paperback - printed 2-sided, with PERSONAL RECOGNIZANCE on the flip side of THE STORY UNTOLD:




Kindle: (just The Story Untold)


audible.com (just The Story Untold)
http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B00AI1DY6S

Personal Recognizance Sime~Gen Book 9, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg,

      Wildside Press, Borgo, 2010, paperback, e-book

      audible.com, 2012

New Paperback


Kindle: (just Personal Recognizance)


audible.com (just Personal Recognizance)
http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B007L5CRQW


The Farris Channel Sime~Gen Book 12 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

      Wildside Press, Borgo, 2012, paperback, e-book               

New Paperback:


Kindle:


audible.com (?)

And just last week, one of the rarest and most expensive of the non-Sime~Gen Novels (originally a St. Martin's Hardcover, then a BenBella trade paperback) came out in ebook, Dreamspy.



Each of these novels, and a long bibliography of shorter works, has a long, involved story behind it, many adventures, many visits to various publishers and editorial offices, to book distributors and distribution warehouses, to bookstores and conventions.  And it's still going on, as publishers shift and change and morph and re-combine their operations and work with me in different ways.  I intend to transmit everything I've learned as things change.
              
There's a more complete bibliography with early editions and foreign editions listed at
http://www.simegen.com/bios/jlbio.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Other Senses, Other Worlds

This is the title of a 1976 book by Doris and David Jones. (Amazon still has used copies for sale.) It’s a great resource for creating aliens that make sense biologically and ecologically. The authors explore the perceptions of Earth animals with different sensory abilities from ours. On the basis of this information, the book imagines how extraterrestrials with those senses as their primary means of perception might look and behave and how their cultures might evolve. For instance, the book first discusses smell, with dogs as only the beginning, since many insects have olfactory senses far sharper and more refined than those of canines. The following chapter imagines a world of Olfaxes, intelligent beings who rely on smell instead of sight as the principal way to to navigate their environment. Olfaxes live on a planet with a murky atmosphere that makes vision of limited use, and they decorate their houses with artfully arranged patterns of scent instead of shape and color.

Later chapters reveal creatures that inhabit sensory “worlds” much stranger from our viewpoint: Animals that perceive polarized light, see into the infrared or ultraviolet range of the spectrum, sense electricity or magnetism, map their surroundings by sonar, or feel minute changes in vibration of air or water. What kind of planet might host life forms that rely on one of these sensory systems as primary, the way we rely on sight? To illustrate these speculations concretely, the authors invent several alien societies in addition to the Olfaxes. The book goes on to speculate about nonhuman methods of communication and types of intelligence alien to us, such as group intelligence. The final chapter, “Beyond Human Intelligence,” imagines where the future evolution of our species might lead. The sections on nonhuman senses, though, are what I find most interesting.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Plot Subtext Integration Part 1

I'm going way out into uncharted waters here to invent, whole cloth out of nothing, an entirely new term, maybe a new concept, in writing craft.

I'm terming it Plot-Subtext Integration.

Plot you all know by now is what I call the sequence of EVENTS in a story, the "because line" of what people do, what that causes to happen, and what other people do about that happening. 

Story is all about what the characters learn from the events that happen -- to make a story work, a writer has to create Events that happen TO the characters, i.e. plot events that drive the story, which then causes character motivations that drive them to act creating further plot events.  That is the integration of plot and story.

If you missed this post, look through it now:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html

The key ingredient, you'll notice, is character at the nexus of plot, story, conflict, -- all of the moving parts of the composition come together at character. 

Sometimes in SF (even Science Fiction Romance) you have "characters" who are machines (R2D2 or Data), and characters who are actually Forces of Nature. 

But what makes all this interesting, what makes it a story, is how all these separate ingredients interact. 

Characters act generating plot, and characters speak revealing story -- sometimes they speak to themselves inside their own heads. 

Characters speaking is dialogue.  We studied dialogue, and will come back to it in the future. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/08/dialogue-part-4-legal-weasel.html

One key ingredient in great dialogue is subtext.

What exactly is subtext?  It's what the character really means to say, but does not or will not exactly put into words. 

In sarcasm, for example, the character says one thing and means the opposite.  A prime example is the word, "Wonderful!" delivered with just that sarcastic intonation.  The un-wonderfulness is the subtext while the actual text is the word WONDERFUL.

Very often subtext is carried on a change of subject:

"So when will you invite me to the Opera?"
"Would you like more coffee?" 

Ostensibly, the subject is fishing for a date -- the subtext is "I want this." and "I'm not ready for this."  Or depending on the context, and the business (for example, texting while talking) the actual subject, the subtext, could be almost anything.  Consider if the exchange were between two spies trying to seduce each other.

So the "subtext" is what the dialogue is really about, and the text can be ostensibly about almost anything else other than the actual subject.

I've rarely seen the term "subtext" applied to elements other than dialogue.

Dialogue can be wordless -- coded into actions, gestures -- one staple of Hollywood films used to be smoking a cigarette, a series of actions that defined character, gave indication of the character's mood, station in life, relationship to the other characters, etc.  Consider the cigarette holder.  Consider the very long cigarette holder.  Watch some old movies if you've missed this.  It's called (in screenwriting) "business" -- the things actors do to communicate subtext.

Well, if subtext can be encoded into cigarette smoking - i.e. actions - then it can be a  component of PLOT.

However, I never realized that before I read this book:




And as I read this "can't put it down" book by an author I love and admire no end, Tanya Huff, it suddenly hit me that the plot lacks subtext.

It hit me only by its absence.

I thought I'd be the only one to notice, but one of the comments on Amazon which gave the book only 3 stars and became the most critical review, noted just in passing that somehow the plot seems to wander.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R282ZQT8Q5RUOZ/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R282ZQT8Q5RUOZ

I think I've found the reason for this review/comment. 

Now this is a good book by a very good writer, and is well worth its Kindle price.

It reads like a story that she just had to tell, just had to write out, scene after scene that's just engrossing, characters revealing themselves -- it reads like raw material that was just typed out.  Then there were a lot of typed words, so the author looked at it and decided it had to be a book because to tell the rest of this story, there has to be this character development.  So she searched her worldbuilding notes and decided to use an Environmental activist group to generate some kind of plot.

Why do I think that's the tacked-on element (and I haven't asked her! I'm just guessing.)?  Because environmental activism is not argued from all sides in the plot. 
When I got to that point in my analysis, I realized that the THEME (what the novel is really about) has to be the SUBTEXT of the PLOT. 

That's the relationship between Theme and Plot discussed at such depth in the 6-post series in January 2013 titled Theme-Plot Integration and all about how to use FALLACY as a plot generating device.

Here are the links to those posts, and there is a 7th one in that series coming March 26, 2013.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/12/theme-plot-integration-part-1-never-let.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/12/theme-plot-integration-part-2-fallacy.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/12/theme-plot-integration-part-3-fallacy.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-4-fallacies.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-5-great.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/theme-plot-integration-part-6-fallacy.html


Once plot and theme are fully integrated, you have an inseparable whole it's impossible to "analyze" (i.e. take apart into its components) because the theme becomes the subtext of the plot.  The theme is what the Events of the plot "really mean" not what they "say they mean." 

Usually, that "sub" level of an artistic composition comes from the artist's own "sub" level - the subconscious. 

A book without such a sub-level is extremely rare in print -- and it is even more rare from a writer who is fully steeped in her craft.  That's why this example of a novel with a subtext-less PLOT is so valuable.

The Wild Ways has plenty of subtext in the dialogue, in the characters, in their learning and practicing of their musical arts -- and in their advancement in their magical application of their musical arts.

It has subtext in family relationships, and all the dialogue with the "Aunties" (power-users among the magical family) and every other aspect of this novel is perfect.

That is what makes the absence of plot-subtext easy to identify.

I can't tell you, "Don't write like this," because obviously there's a nice, huge, market for this type of composition. 

But I do suggest that if you do it, you do it with conscious deliberation and, if you will, "Malice Aforethought."

Note also that it very likely won't work for readers who have not read the prior book where the worldbuilding is set out with great care to crafting the theme.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

As some of the readers of this group blog may know, this author (Rowena Cherry) takes a very serious interest in copyright, and the erosion of copyright protections for creators that are offered by current law.

Frankly, I am disturbed by the reported/published opinions of judges and of legal scholars, of educators and other members of the intelligentsia who ought to understand what the law is with regard to the rights of authors, musicians, photographers and other creators to be paid whenever their work is enjoyed by a new user or monetized for profit by a third party.

Sometimes, good-hearted people use sloppy language. I hope that this was the case in a legal blog that came to my notice yesterday.

A big question about the future of the book publishing business: who sets the price of eBooks?

The author of the article for Lexology was written by one Mr. Fisher. As an author, I believe that there are a few misstatements of fact, that do authors and creators a disservice.

http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=298fb103-b597-4c73-8696-f6812cc16e0d&utm_source=lexology+daily+newsfeed&utm_medium=html+email+-+body+-+federal+section&utm_campaign=lexology+subscriber+daily+feed&utm_content=lexology+daily+newsfeed+2013-02-15&utm_term=

For instance, there is this statement, which refers to music and publishing.
 "There are significant differences in the two businesses, even though they both obviously involve sale of copyrighted content."

I find this wording problematic. The copyrighted content is not sold ever. In the case of paper books, the paper is sold and First Sale Doctrine obtains. In the case of e-books, the right to read the content is licensed.

The lawyer continues

"Book publishers have always set the suggested list price of printed books. Bookstores were free to sell the books to customers like us at any price"

To which, I respond....

Please note that Copyright law gives the copyright owner the right to set the price of the work.

The lawyer and customer continues the tired argument, much loved by freetards: 

"In other words, many publishers wanted to price their eBooks at prices very similar to their print books, even though with eBooks there is no need to buy paper and pay binderies, no warehousing, no trucks to transport boxes of books, and no returns (the expensive system through which book publishers accept unlimited return for full monetary credit of unsold physical books from bookstores)."

In my view, the public (and scholars) widely over-rate the value of that part of the business. The greatest costs in producing novels are the hours and years spent writing the work, the hours and hours spend editing and copy-editing and proof-reading the works, in paying editors, secretaries, artists, authors .... myriad overheads that apply to e-books just as much as to print.

Regarding "and no returns" in my opinion, he over simplifies.

Amazon accepts returns of e-books for up to 2 weeks, I have heard. Authors are hurt just as much by e-book returns as by physical book returns, if not more because of the possibility that during that 2 period, unlimited perfect copies could have been made of the work.

Persons who opine on the book industry should also be aware of the practice of "stripping" in which bricks and mortar stores such as would return only the cover of the unsold books (to save postage) for a refund or credit, and would sell the "pulp" to the paper recycling plant. The paper book was destroyed, and the authors got no royalties.

 The lawyer concludes: "Moreover the effect of piracy and swapping of files is not the same in the two copyright industries. The digital revolution will disrupt and restructure the book publishing industry even further – including what publishers charge for books and how much we pay for them.  That’s for certain".

 I disagree. From what I can see, the effect of piracy is devastating for both music and literature. In my opinion, everyone should check out www.thetrichordist.com for insights into what has happened to musicians and what is happening to authors.

Another good resource for standard excuses for piracy and common sense replies is
http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/02/why-piracy-is-never-okay/

One of my good friends recently found an illegal copy of a book that is sold only and exclusively on Amazon being offered on a WORDPRESS site. This is an example of an offering (not hers):


If you would like download "XXXredactedXXX  by ReactedFirstname RedactedLastname (2 Feb 2012), you are in the right place. On the website we have this file in doc, pdf and epub.
http://ebookeoredactedurl.com  (The url will not work, because I have messed with it.)

Clicking a bitly shortened url (also messed with) http://bit.ly/WXXXN brings this popup
Complete an Offer to Continue Your Download!
_Please complete an offer below to unlock this page!_

*You could win the new iPad2!*
*Watch the Funniest Videos Online!*
*Choose Correctly & Win an AUDI Sports Car!*
*Fill up at Sainsburys Petrol Stations on us!*
*Chance to take a £1,000 Shopping Spree!*
*WIN the New iPhone 5!*

It appears to this author that APPLE, Sainsburys, and AUDI are making it profitable for a pirate to infringe the copyright of an author. WORDPRESS is making it profitable. I assume that an online payment processor is facilitating payments to everyone involved except for the person who spent years writing the book.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

More Weird Sex

In honor of Valentine’s Day, consider some of the many strange modes of lovemaking in the natural world. For inspiration on alien mating habits, try WILD SEX: WAY BEYOND THE BIRDS AND THE BEES, a 1991 book by naturalist Susan Windybank. Almost everything you might want to know about animal reproductive biology is at least touched upon in this book. The author traces the evolution of sex all the way from protozoans up to mammals. Some chapters have provocative titles such as “Bondage,” “Fatal Love,” “Virgin Birth,” “Polyandry,” “Incest,” and “Transvestism” (which should more accurately be labeled transsexualism, the conversion of an animal from one sex to the other, as normally occurs in some species of fish), among many others. Boxes inserted between blocks of text offer odd information such as the facts that the female canary must hear the male’s song in order for her ovaries to ripen, armadillos always give birth to identical quadruplets, and a male garter snake plugs up the female’s vagina after copulation to prevent other suitors from mating with her.

Other weird reproductive factoids:

Cockroaches have multiple hook-shaped penises.

The female bedbug has no vagina. The male has to drill into her abdomen to insert sperm.

The Surinam toad carries her eggs and hatchlings on her back until they outgrow the tadpole stage and become immature frogs.

The eggs of the mouthbrooder fish are fertilized inside her mouth. She catches her eggs in her mouth, then performs “oral sex” on the male fish to receive his sperm.

A pair of Indian pythons has been observed copulating for 180 days.

The male octopus uses a specialized arm to insert packets of semen into the female’s body cavity. Sometimes this appendage breaks off and stays inside her, where it used to be mistaken by scientists for a parasitic worm.

Offspring of the Chalcid Wasp can breed in the egg phase of development. Like tribbles, they can be born pregnant!

As Willow says on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, “Love makes you do the wacky.”

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 2 - Advertising Video Writing

Other posts directly on Worldbuilding:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/worldbuilding-building-fictional-but.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html
(this is Part 1 of "worldbuilding from reality")

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/worldbuilding-for-science-fiction.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/12/worldbuilding-by-committee.html

And I've done whole sets of posts on Worldbuilding integrating Plot and integrating Theme into the entire composition.  I'll have to collect them in a reference post soon.  Meanwhile, here's a list of links to my posts on worldbuilding that don't have "worldbuilding" in the title:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/06/worldbuilding-link-list.html

One reason I harp on Worldbuilding as a writing craft subject, hitting at every angle, is that it is the single weakest skill of Romance Writers. 

Most Romance writers work in some version of the "real" world -- even historicals have "facts" that delineate the world the characters live in and that the readers have to agree are "real facts" because they know them from "real world" sources outside the fictional reality of the story. 

Writers study "researching" assiduously, (which is good, and necessary), but they don't learn how to use research to "make up" imaginary facts then "sell" them to the readers as real.  That's the skill necessary for Paranormal Romance writing, and even for Science Fiction which goes beyond known science extrapolating into "what if science is wrong about this? Then what might be right?" 

Most Historical Romance readers are magnificently well educated in historical cultures, and you just can't fool them.

The same is true of science fiction readers -- they know science, so you better know your science when you write for them or they can't suspend disbelief well enough to romp with your characters. 

Fantasy and Paranormal Romance readers know anthropology, archeology, mythology, and a lot more -ologies  -- so you better know your Magic systems from historical reality when you invent a new one.  To invent a Magic System, you must first invent the world in which that magic system can plausibly function to get the effects on the characters you need. 

Since the Romance readers have developed a taste for Alien Romance, Romance writers have had to learn this whole new skill set I call "Worldbuilding."  It's a skill set that allows a writer to immerse a reader painlessly and seamlessly into a story set in a totally fictitious world, a completely impossible world, a world where a set of highly improbable character developments, and especially Relationships, are inevitable. 

Such an impossible world, properly "built," becomes "Art" when it is built to reveal some higher truth, some fundamental aspect of our everyday reality that is masked from ordinary consciousness.  Google+ and Google are amazing sources of oddball items you can use to achieve this kind of "Art." 

Here is a recent book by a brain surgeon who experienced a "higher truth" about the structure of reality during a coma and wrote a book about it:



You can find a long article about this book here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/11/18/the-science-of-heaven.html

As I've pointed out in my series of posts here on Astrology, Romance generally occurs to real people during a Neptune Transit.  Astrologers associate a Neptune Transit with a blurred or erroneous perception of reality, but mystics have learned how such Neptune transits reveal Higher Truths - the reality behind our reality - in which "Happily Ever After" is the inevitable outcome of a well lived life.  That is not a "reality" in which there are no rules, so a writer can just make up anything that occurs to them.  In such Neptune governed realities, there are very strict rules indeed, but communicating those rules to your readers who live in "normal" worlds is an entire skill set peculiar to Science Fiction writers.

Science Fiction writers developed this skill set over the decades from the 1930's or so, and I learned at their feet.  So I'm passing on what I've learned, only I'm using contemporary (to this writing) examples.  You will pass this on using examples contemporary to that future time, but the essence is the same. 

The fictional world you build has to start here and now in your reader's real world, and extend outward to that fictional realm of "far away places with strange sounding names." 

If you need inspiration, here's a song for MP3 download of "Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names":



And a biography of one of my favorite writers, Allan Cole, about when he was a CIA brat dragged to Cyprus where his father dealt in Cold War secrets and he dealt with a British school that didn't like Americans.  The book reminded me of that old song, a primary inspiration for many of my novels because the song is an entry point into that "other" level of consciousness.



Closer to home and everyday reality, I've also done sets of posts on the whole new world we live in where writers have to do a lot if not all their own advertising, promotion, and marketing, often at their own expense.

That is the world your reader lives in, so you don't have to explain it when you are telling a story.  But the trick of storytelling is that the teller has to know more about the subject than the listener, yet not tell or even show, all she knows to the reader.  The key is to ignite the reader's imagination so the reader tells herself her own story -- not yours. 

Think about it - do you want to listen to (and pay close attention to) someone who obviously knows less about their subject than you do? 

A novelist, a writer, isn't exactly a 'teacher' per se.  A writer is in a dialogue with their reader.  Books are a conversation among those who are writing the books, and letting the readers kibitz.  Eventually, those readers will have their say, too, either by writing a book of their own or by flinging a comment up on Amazon or somewhere, or just going off to imagine their own ending to your story.

Think about being at a party in a room full of people, and you're standing in a circle with a nice drink in your hand, holding forth on a pet subject.

To keep the others in the circle quiet and still while you make your point (i.e. advertise your wares) you need two things:

a) something to say
b) something you know that they don't, or that they haven't viewed from your perspective.

Perspective is what LUCKY IN CYPRUS shows you how to achieve.  It's a book worth studying, just for that alone. 

You need to offer to add something to your listener's understanding of a subject, even if it's not more than the mere fact that you agree with them but can say it better.  If you can explain what they are feeling or knowing without words, they will grab that explanation and spread it around - often citing you as the source. 

A lot of what goes on Google+ or Facebook is just that - "samplers" (little artworks with words) that state something people are thinking, but spin it a new way.  People see what they feel stated in words and click "share." 

So when you set out to write a novel, especially in a well-explored genre like Romance, you have to have something new to say -- at least something new to the expected readership. 

What have you got to say that your readers don't already know?  What have you got to say that your readers know in their guts but can't quite articulate for themselves?  What can you add to the quality of their lives -- what can you give them to "share" or repeat to their friends saying, "You just have to read this book!"

What can you say that will make them remember your byline? 

THAT thing -- what you have to say -- is what you put into your book trailer that gets it "shared" on YouTube. 

Every novel is an argument set out step by step, enumerating things the reader already knows, then embroidering those things together into a new pattern, something memorable that encapsulates a Life Lesson (such as Love Conquers All).  That life-lesson is the theme.  And you get it from that "other" place the neurologist's book, The Science of Heaven, talks about.

That's where "theme" comes from - your visits to that other "place" which most people access only during sleep.  But you never quite remember your dreams.  Writers are the sort who can put those dreams into words (or pictures) so others recognize that other "place" they regularly visit.  That's where "life's lessons" come from. 

The life-lessons are pretty much the same over thousands of years, but the application can be very different and require a lot of original thinking.  That original thinking can reveal major flaws or fallacies in those old life-lessons.

But sometimes, that original thinking involves understanding a long-term (decades or centuries long) cycle.

Human affairs, from love to politics, from religion to war, from law to justice, move in short cycles and long cycles.  History, as all students of Romance Writing know, is remarkably cyclical.

Look at Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels -- she shows us how women's rights in Rome differed from the previous Hellenistic culture, and how women lost rights in the Middle Ages, struggled in Victorian England, emerged again -- what's happening now in this world? 

OK, so you get the picture.  You must have something to say that a group at a party (or buyers of a novel) will stand still and listen to, appreciate, recognize as their own gut-level response to their "dreams" writ large.  They will repeat to others what you've said, point to you and become your "word of mouth" advertising. 

What you have to say must be original and different -- yet recognizable as what your listeners already know to be true, but can't quite say. 

So find a repeating CYCLE manifesting in everyday reality that describes what they experience in their dreams, in their nightly visits to "heaven" as the nuerosurgeon described it, and demonstrate that dreams can be real -- or not depending on your theme!   

In "Magic" it is taught, "As Above: So Below" -- and that's what this neurosurgeon was talking about with his coma experience of Heaven.  He discovered there really is an "Above."  He just doesn't know which is the cause and which the effect: brain or mind?  And of course, the artist's question is: "Does it matter which is which?"  That kind of question defines THEME. 

Which brings us to an online video that is a waste of a bit more than an hour of your time that could pay off big if you can understand what it's saying that you can use in a Romance Novel. 

This video is ADVERTISING, and it uses clever (even diabolical) techniques (skills) to open a vista into that "other" place evoked by the SONG (Far Away Places With Strange Sounding Names), visited by Allan Cole in his biography, and daringly admitted to by a neurosurgeon in his account of his coma. 

This video "romances" its viewers with a whiff of their most cherished hopes and dreams - enticing, hooking, then finally getting to the point -- 'buy this and realize your dreams.'  At the end of the video, notice particularly how the word "safe" is used.  There are a hundred Romance Novel themes in that one word's usage alone.  Study this video:

http://pro.stansberryresearch.com/1210THIRDLIA/LPSINC01/

It is a sales pitch that you've seen advertised all over the internet -- even on TV, I'll bet! 

It's in a format I've seen used by sales pitches now for a couple of years.  I absolutely hate it, and this particular one makes me squirm. 

But it's so pervasive for a reason.  It's latched onto something eye-stopping for a "hook" (Obama's Third Term), and then follows up with a lot more "hooks" -- all loaded with 'bait' to keep you hooked.

Then it "explains" as if giving you information you don't already have. 

The information about previous Presidents and what they've added to the USA historically is accurate, cleanly presented, and nicely packaged, carefully selected to make this video's point.

And all of it is laced with more bait, but not "hard-sell" -- it's very cleverly written.  This thing illustrates "worldbuilding" at its very best. 

The video is a pitch for an Investment Company that wants people who have a lot of money to become "clients" -- to subscribe to a newsletter, and then hire the company to deploy investment capital for them.

HOW MUCH DO YOU THINK THEY PAID TO GET THIS VIDEO'S TEXT WRITTEN? 

Could you make that much on a Romance Novel?  Really? 

If you are putting so much effort into mastering worldbuilding skills, don't you want to maximize your return on investment?

Do you think this sales-pitch video is not "worldbuilding at its best?"  Do you think it's not "fantasy?"  Do you honestly believe this video is not "romancing" these potential clients? 

Remember the old adage I've been showing you how to use as a plotting tool, "If you want to understand what's happening, follow the money."

Look at this video.  It has one stationary, public domain picture, and a set of words with a voice reading the words to you at a very slow pace.

Do you think it was cheap to make?  Well, comparatively, maybe, but simple elegance is not CHEAP! 

There are lots of other videos like this all over the internet using this exact format.  They work.  They get people to do whatever it is they're pitching.

Study how the argument is constructed.  Really, sit through this video a couple of times and take notes on the structure of the argument. 

See if you can find the most glaring grammatical error I saw.  See if you can spot the "bait and switch" tactic -- OK, I'll give you a hint.  It starts out talking about the oil drilling in the Dakotas that you've all heard about and know, then ends up trying to sell you on investing in natural gas which the earlier presentation on oil clearly indicates will plunge in price.  Then it says you should buy the most risky investment I know of (distressed debt instruments) because they're "safe."  But of course you can't invest in this safe investment by yourself - you don't know enough or have the skills.  You have to hire them to do it for you - because, you see, it's safe. 

This sales pitch format - filled with logic holes and ignoring known facts by just not mentioning them - is extremely effective in triggering the behavior desired by the pitcher.  How would you use this methodology to "sell" the idea that "Love Conquers All" and "Happily Ever After" is the normal, ordinary condition of life that anyone can achieve? 

If you've been watching TV shows like Leverage that I've discussed previously, you won't fall for the grifter's tricks in this video - and you'll learn how to use them to your own advantage without doing anything immoral or unethical. 

By the time you get to that switch from oil to gas in the video, notice how you're ready to believe the video is giving you some real advantage in investing -- maybe because you're bored out of your mind with oil and the change in topic restores interest, but mostly because the speaker has gained credibility by telling you what you already know (that oil drilling is a big deal all of a sudden).

There's one passing shrug about green energy - pointing out the price differential with a very quickly shown table you don't have time to study.  There's no handy way to roll the video back and re-watch a page or two to check you understood it, which is very clever disabling of online features.

The whole thing is full of tricks you have been learning to use in writing Paranormal Romance - tricks to get readers to believe the impossible.  Some of those tricks are used to present the obviously true -- so the trick itself isn't obvious when the video gets to the obviously untrue.

The whole thing is a marvelous study in motivation-manipulation.

Remember, I've mentioned the science behind this kind of advertising many times.

We start with the raw math of Game Theory and the Overton Window (Google those terms if you haven't studied them yet) and layer on top of that the entire science of advertising.  This video is predicting an Overton Window, or saying that such a window is open right now.  And it's purporting to show you how to play this game to your advantage (by hiring this company to do it for you).

And deep inside this video, if you reverse engineer it using the clues I've been talking about in the Worldbuilding posts, you will find Edward Bernays that I've mentioned over the last few months.

Here's a neat article from npr on Bernays:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612464

Look up Bernays on Wikipedia for more nifty bits and tidbits.

The techniques founded on Bernays principles are suavely orchestrated into this video.  I can see how it was done.  Can you?  Yet?  Study.  Study hard. 

And all those techniques are yours to use a) in your constructing of your Romance novel most especially Paranormal Romance, b) in your constructing of your advertising for your novel, and c) in taking contracts to write advertising like this for others selling things other than your novels.   

Very few novelists make a living from novels -- advertising copy writers make a good living.  This video is nothing but copyrighting and good, dramatic reading.  Study it carefully. 

A very large percentage of novelists make their major income from a day-job writing non-fiction -- in journalism (as Allan Cole did after his stint in Cyprus -- before his screenwriting career and his novel writing career), in paid blogging, or advertising. 

Study this video and ponder your career moves based on whether you can master these copy-writing and advertising constructing skills to a level where you can sell those skills as your primary income source, so you can write your novels your own way. 

But keep in mind that this video has been all over the internet for years before I decided I had to watch it.  I had to watch it because it's all over.  Every time it is offered in a side-bar, the company being advertised in it is paying a fee.  They wouldn't keep doing that if the video didn't bring in customers.  You want to understand what's happening -- follow the money.  Closely. 

Now, when you're ready for worldbuilding on a more sophisticated level, restudy that video after re-reading the Theme-Plot Integration series on the use of Fallacy as a plotting tool -- 6 of those posts went up here in January-February 2013. 

By the way: I've recommended in many of these writing craft posts that beginners start learning to write by reading the biographies of writers (and autobiographies).  This one cited here, LUCKY IN CYPRUS, is an excellent example.  Note Allan Cole's eclectic interest in reading, in devouring a variety of subjects, the thirst for knowledge and for learning, the focus on first-hand experience, and the globe-trotting lifestyle at a young age.  These elements are common to all the most successful writers.  Read this biography closely.  Here is Allan Cole's credit list on imdb.com

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0170426/

There's a couple people with that same byline.  That imdb page is by the fellow who wrote LUCKY IN CYPRUS and the Sten Series of novels.  See him on Amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/Allan-Cole/e/B000AR9N24/

This kind of biographical history is a very firm predictor of commercial success in writing.  There are apparent exceptions, of course, but the preponderance of evidence is on the side of a "colorful" early biography.  With that in mind read my blog entries on Pluto. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Assault On Copyright

"An economy built on the illegal exploitation of artists, is very simply an Exploitation Economy." Quoted from http://thetrichordist.com

If you are an individual author, or photographer, or songwriter, or musician, or artist, big business wants to change the law and the morality of the free world so that they can strip you of your copyrights, steal your works, and make money for themselves without paying you.

Nowhere have I seen the reality so clearly explained as on thetrichordist.com. Read the Orphan Works series. Or check out the War On Authors posts.

We (copyright owners and creators) are being exploited, dissed, screwed, and called "greedy" while those who aggressively avoid paying authors are happy to pay very large sums of cash Google, Apple, Microsoft, PayPal, Amazon and dozens of other true fat cats.

My eyes have been widened as I read the articles on the trichordist blog in preparation for an interview with one of the trichodrist team for my Crazy Tuesday radio show. Every so often, I invite guests to talk about copyright, and this interview is going to be very interesting.

Meanwhile, noted sci fi author and president of SFWA John Scalzi has the liveliest of discussions taking place on his blog. Of especial interest (in my opinion)  is  
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/02/07/second-hand-ebooks
and also 
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/02/07/no-wait-i-do-have-another-thought-re-used-ebooks/

As many of Mr. Scalzi's correspondents speculate on the probability that Amazon's patent is purely motivated and benignly intended to prevent less ethical internet enterprises from ripping off authors and killing the market for new ebooks, I checked out Amazon’s Sell Your Stuff gateway page.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/sell-your-stuff.html/ref=ret_ro_si

This is the link for anyone who wants to sell their used copy of Mr. Scalzi’s e-book A Voice In The Wilderness.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/seller/search.html?ie=UTF8&index=stripbooks&keywords=A%20Voice%20In%20The%20Wilderness&ld=direct-link&x=51&y=6

They can't. So, why is his ebook listed at all on the Sell Your Stuff pages? My ebook is also listed, and again the dotted lines are broken and there is therefore no box indicating that my ebook could be "re-sold". I am reassured to see that there is no indication at all that the illegal ebook versions of some of my paperbacks-- that never should have been created and offered for sale-- ever existed.

It should be noted that re-selling ebooks is apparently legal in the EEC. 
One should check   sell my stuff amazon co uk   also http://www.amazon.de/b?ie=UTF8&node=949953031

So far, it seems reassuringly as if ebooks are not being sold by the general public to other members of the general public with no commission to the authors. 

All the best,

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/