Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story - Part 3 - Reliability by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story
Part 3
Reliability
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 
Previous Parts to this series:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-1.html

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

This post is about a Life Hack which has led to riches. 

We have been discussing the love story that every novel needs.  The core of the matter is the ability to love yourself, which is very different from self-love or narcissism.  



To love yourself, you have to come to trust yourself.  Sometimes it takes a blindingly confusing Romance to achieve that kind of self-trust that lets you love yourself enough to love another.  Can you rely on yourself to come through in a pinch? 

One of the Big Issues couples face, sometimes at the outset of their Love Story, sometimes right in the middle of the Romance, and sometimes as a prelude to Divorce, is the issue of Reliability.

Can you trust this person?  Has something they've done so surprised and shocked you that you no longer know "who" this person really is?  Studying the Identity of others is the key to not being betrayed. 

Writers who depict characters losing trust often brush aside the whole matter of how different people understand the world, as if understanding the world had nothing to do with trusting a specific person.

If you want your characters to sparkle, to come to life with depth, you need to study real people in depth, how they think and what they think about -- and why. 

To know whether a given person will see this politician as a Hero and that politician as a Villain, you need to know more about that given person than just what they've said on Facebook.  To predict behavior, you must understand the person. 

Likewise, a writer must create a character from the inside out and place that character within the spectrum of the reader's everyday experience of "people in general."  A character has to be recognizable to the reader. 

I've never seen a more comprehensive rundown on exactly how to accomplish that framing of a character to be trusted by the reader than in this article:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelsimmons/2015/03/23/how-one-life-hack-from-a-self-made-billionaire-leads-to-exceptional-success/

It is about a real life billionaire -- as in "How To Marry A Billionaire" only for real.

This old man was young and hot, at one time -- and he wasn't a billionaire then. 

Knowing how this fellow, Charlie Munger, approached analyzing the world of people and technology, of science and psychology, of marketing and value, you could have guessed he would become very-very-very rich.

There are more ways to be rich than just to have a lot of money.  Romance writers depict most all those ways of achieving wealth of body, mind and soul, but in this case, Charlie Munger set out to make money -- and he succeeded.  He is happy with that choice, very professional about it. 

This method sketched in this article is one you can use to characterize a character who is going to become a billionaire.  Is that guy or gal worth marrying, though?  What kind of billionaire would they be?

The path to riches is fraught with failures, to be sure, but those failures lead to formulating a set of rules about what behavior to expect from certain Groups, and how to define those Groups.

If you understand the goals, motivations and belief sets common among a lot of people, you can trust them to behave in a predictable way.

Trust that is not "betrayed" or violated is based in a full, deep, far reaching, multi-variable understanding of the parameters that define another person.  To trust someone you must study them, and study the Groups to which they belong.

To understand the forces driving another person, you must understand that "forces" also drive you -- some from inside, some chosen by you, some launched by others, and some from the Heavens. 

To attain that kind of understanding of another, as pointed out in previous entries in this series, you must somehow find a way to love yourself so that you do not see only yourself when you look at others.  That method of finding a way to love yourself is called a Life Hack.  Cracking the code of life, gaining entry into another person's innermost being and finding yourself in there -- that is a Life Hack.  Fiction is the textbook to that course in coding life.  Romance 101 is required for graduation. 

Fiction has to reflect the general shape of reality to be comprehensible and believable.  You have to be able to see into another person in order to love them.  After that, what you see in them can draw you into Romance under the right circumstances. 

There can be love without romance, and romance without love.  They are independent variables.  So you can surround your characters with other characters, some of whom reflect your Main Character back at himself, some of whom show complex depths that are lovable, some of whom are shallow and unlovable, and one or two of whom totally enchant your main character.

Enchanted, your Main Character may fall into a Romance.

Or, if you are writing another genre, your main character may learn to trust another by understanding that other.  Once trusted, that other character may be able to learn to love himself, and thus become truly rich.  The password, the key, to life hacking is trust.  If you are betrayed, it is because you did not understand what you were trusting.  Read that article about Charlie Munger.

Study how Charlie Munger, Billionaire Extraordinaire, studies the world and trusts people will behave predictably.  Use that method to depict a character who is learning the difference between riches and love.  That difference is one of the most powerful life hacks.

Here's a previous blog post on the 1% and the nature of the billionaire phenomenon.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/02/depiction-part-6-depicting-money-and.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Are You Thinking Of Joining the Authors' Guild?

The Authors' Guild is a professional association for authors which offers such benefits to members as:

• Free legal help on writing and publishing matters-including written book contract reviews.

• Author website building with our exclusive Sitebuilder software and low-cost hosting (in most cases just $6 per month).

• Free seminars, covering topics such as marketing and publicity, movie deals, estate planning, and more. 

• Medical and dental insurance group policies through TEIGIT 

Authors' Guild is active in advocating on Capitol Hill and in the law courts for authors' copyright protection, with publishers for fair contracts, and for protection against predatory practices that erode copyright. There is also a charity run through Authors' Guild to assist distressed members.

Annual membership fees increased to $125 this year, but for a limited time, eligible new members can join for $100 through this link.

http://www.authorsguild.net/services/join?rc=2161c5f8487abc08 

(Full disclosure: if you use this particular link, you will save $25 off your first year's membership fee, and you will also save ME $25 off my membership fee for 2016. Thank you!)

Not only traditionally published authors qualify for membership; self-published and freelance authors earning at least $500 in writing income can become members of the Guild. Learn more about eligibility criteria here. 

Thank you,

Rowena Cherry

Lists of Fictional Things

A Facebook post this week drew attention to a Wikipedia list of fictional expletives. ("Shen," from Jacqueline's Sime-Gen universe, appears there, as do "hraka" and "embleer" from WATERSHIP DOWN and many invented rude words from works I'm not familiar with.) From that page, I discovered a cool and useful page I had no idea existed:

Lists of Fictional Things

The subcategories range all the way from the cosmic -- list of fictional universes -- through planets, animals, plants, languages, etc., down to minute trivia (e.g., radio stations, TV stations, diaries, addresses of fictional characters).

These lists are fun to explore. Who'd have thought there would be enough fictional license plate numbers to warrant a page of their own?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story - Part 2 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story
Part 2
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

In Part 1 of this series
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-1.html
we noted how the signature of a Strong Character is that the Character "arcs" -- or changes their emotional responses to situations because of some life-lesson learned "the hard way" in the "school of hard knocks."

Characters get pummeled by Events you create.  They learn from the Events (the plot) and they do not necessarily learn the best or most correct lesson the first time you hit them with an Event.

Characters that are strong at the beginning of the story get pummeled with Events until they break  -- think of Spock crying alone in the briefing room.  Leonard Nimoy knew Spock's strength had to be broken in order to engage viewer interest. 

Granite strength all by itself is not interesting.  So writers break their strongest characters.

Start with a weak character, someone gripped by the "I can't" or "I'm doing all I can, so how can you expect more of me?" attitude, hammer that character to pulverize them, and chronicle their path to becoming a strong character.  That's Character Arc.

So, Strong Characters can be weak at the beginning of the Arc, and the strength is revealed as you hammer them into becoming Strong.

What exactly is it that writers hammer at in either the strong or weak character that changes them, that morphs them along an Arc?

What causes people to change in real life?  What causes people to start to behave differently, and seem "out of character" for a while, until friends and family get used to the new person? 

What changes in life that re-formulates a person's behavior? 

I submit that the easiest attribute of a Character for a writer to depict as Arcing, or changing in a way that readers can see as realistic, is the ability to Love.

That is the "wall" that Events hammer at to Arc a character.

It is the ability to establish and maintain Relationships that distinguishes the Happy person from the miserable person.  We draw our strength of character from our "stance" among our people, our family, our co-workers, our buddies, our spouse, our children, our distant relatives, and just friends made via organizations.

How many times have you seen the story of the lone-gunman who shoots up a crowd and nobody expected it because "he kept to himself" and "he seemed like a nice guy" but he had no close friends (or the ones he had were likewise disconnected.)

As humans, we need to belong, to connect, to be surrounded by layers upon layers of people who know intimately, less well, distantly, and just feel general kinship with because we share a fandom, a reading taste, a craft etc.  We speak of "the Music World" and "the Golf World" -- and we say, "Welcome to my world." 

We live in "worlds" composed of layers of associates.

The entre into such a "world" is via the close, immediate, intertwined, personal Relationship.

Enemies, Adversaries, a policeman's quarry (think TV Series THE FUGITIVE), relationships can be incredibly intimate and even replace true love for a time.

Social networking has leveraged that layered-worlds structure of human life into a profitable business where you are their product which they sell to advertisers.

We are creatures of Relationship, embedded in a physical world composed of intricate layers of interlaced relationships.  Think of the way genetics has evolved -- almost all life on Earth shares basic building block genes.  (almost since there are non-carbon single-cell life near hot vents in the bottom of the ocean) 

Most all life on Earth is genetically related, which is why we can use animals to test new drugs and why we shudder at the mere thought of doing that!  We are all of one piece.

But we don't see that, at least not at the surface of our awareness.  We don't see into another person's emotional life, the internal structure of another person's decision making process, their most dearly held values, their unconscious assumptions about what is right and what is wrong.

That realm of the unconsciously held Value System is where the writer works.

Writers probe, explore, learn, and map their own unconscious minds, especially the Value System they imbibed with Mother's Milk.  We acquire our first values from our parents, but as life goes on, we acquire more layers of values around those.

Sometimes the later value acquisitions logically contradict earlier ones, but we hold onto all of them as our OWN -- we identify with the wild and incompatible mix of values we have created and call it our Identity.

Thus when a person's Values are attacked by another person (who may or may not have different values), it feels like a threat to LIFE ITSELF.  It feels like a threat to existence.  People will tolerate starvation or being shot at by hostiles better than they will having their unconscious Values contradicted.

Yes, mere words can trigger a counter-attack as if life and existence were at stake.

Politics and Religion are two topics that are rooted in that first learned, unconscious value system that most likely has been overlaid by Values acquired in college, which have been overlaid by Values acquired on the job. 

That's why they are explosive topics for family gatherings (and wondrous sources of Conflict that can advance a Plot). 

Today, in our modern world, Politics and Religion are mixing at depths not seen since the Middle Ages when The Church basically ran the Governments of Europe.

The Crusades were a show-don't-tell manifestation of the mixing of Politics (Kings) with Religion (The Cross). 

Today, the explosive mix is Science vs. Religion.  What sane person could possibly reject Evolution or want to teach Creationism in schools?  See?  "sane" -- "If you don't share my Values, you are not a Person." 

In other words, we tend to work on the assumption that the only people whose opinions count are the people who share our Values.

But nobody shares anyone's Values.  As described above, each individual person accumulates layers upon layers of different values and morphs the disparate mess into some kind of ball of wax which they use as their Identity. 

Each of us is unique -- but we want to associate only with those who are identical to us, at least in our intimate relationships. 

As noted in Part 1, look closely at the TV Series SUITS.  Suits works via the way the senior (Harvey Specter) sees himself in the junior (Mike Ross).  When Mike doesn't do what Harvey would do, Harvey is uncomfortable and acts out.

Now back to the Romance Novel, which is what this blog is all about. 

Consider the various ideas of what Love is. 

You will find Romance depicted as about co-dependence, as about feelings only, as about bodily functions only, as about paying attention only to me.  And all of these variations are real, and all matter, and all of them are necessary ingredients in Romance.

It is very true that you can have amazing Romance without a trace of Love at all.

"Love" (with a capital L) is a spiritual thing that transcends our innate insanities.  Love with a capital L is an experience of the Soul that changes the Soul -- i.e. that causes Character to Arc.

Real change happens when channels of the Personality open to Love.

That happens under different circumstances for different people at different times of Life.  Sometimes it is religious conversion, sometimes encountering a senior mentor, sometimes the birth of your first child, sometimes it is finding your Soul Mate.

People (and Characters) change not by becoming someone else, not by losing or gaining abilities or Talents, but by re-arranging their characteristics.

Thus a Character Arc Event causes an aggressive person who is likely to solve any problem by putting out a Hit on the opposition into someone who behaves more like Harvey Specter in SUITS and leverages the other person's emotional weaknesses.

The Aggression is still there, but the channel is different.

An alcoholic might morph into someone who eats or smokes too much, but holds a job and is kind to his kids.

All the traits remain, but the emphasis and utilization changes. 

Why does that happen? 

One of the key ingredients that forms our crazy-quilt pattern of Values is our Relationships.  There is a well studied trait of human perception (see the TV Series Perception) that causes us to see ourselves in others.

When you hate someone, when someone just plain drives you crazy, and you go around with an inner dialogue counting their failings and what they should do about it, then very likely (not always, but most of the time) you are seeing yourself in that person.

Other people are the mirror in which we see our own reflection.

But like with a mirror, you see a reversal of the image, and you can see what is behind you (e.g. in your subconscious).  You see deeper into yourself, into the dark underside of yourself, because the other person is so very different from you.

You see their faults, and their faults are visible because they are different.

Writers leverage that common human perception by creating Characters who are so very different from the reader that the reader is barely aware of the similarity.  When it strikes the reader just right, that difference allows the reader to identify with the character and walk in their moccasins. 

So people react emotionally to other people according to how they love or hate themselves.  But as noted above, Identity is a pearl composed of layers of contradiction accreted around a sharp-grain of pain that caused the acquisition of a Value.

That pain might be a parental smack, a deprivation from a toy, a forced-sharing with a sibling, and rewards of kindness, love, joy, celebration. 

Right and Wrong and what is more important than what (i.e. Values) are absorbed from parents via what the parents do, not what the parents say -- so Values are non-verbal and conveyed with a Sharp Pain that forces the pain to be wrapped by a Value that will henceforth prevent that Pain. 

So when we see someone who is Wrong -- we react to that wrongness.  How we react, what we do about Wrong People, is influenced by our ability to Love our own Self -- to admire our pearls that encase our Pain and create Values.

If we Love ourselves because we know how we have just barely managed to cope with our Pain, we are able to see others struggling (and sometimes failing) to cope with their Pain.  We know that sometimes a Pain does not get encased in a Pearl of Values - a lesson is not (yet) learned and successfully applied to life.

Lessons can be rejected, maybe never learned, because of some other Belief that is in the way, that contradicts or conflicts and thus causes Truth to be rejected. 

People who do not (yet) love themselves, see nothing but their own reflection in the mirrors of the people around them, and thus are in effect isolated, alone, unloved, and frustrated.  Such people may compensate by narcissism, which others interpret as self-love. 

How does a writer depict people caught in a House of Mirrors life where all they can see in those around them are hateful traits? 

Dialogue is the answer.  How a Character speaks, what opinions so desperately need airing, what opinions (and the vocabulary to express them) burst out with loud urgency, and to whom those opinions are expressed (with what collateral damage), depicts the Character's inner conflict, inner story, and subconscious Values.

A Character's emotional life is revealed in Dialogue. 

Here is an example to study, from a piece of non-fiction analyzing our current real world situation. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/03/16/1371324/-Adelson-and-Kristol-attempt-the-first-Liberum-Veto-in-US-history

The author is
 arendt 

-------quote from opening line----------
As the GOP sabotage and sedition continues, the US appears to be going the way of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth (P-LC) rather than the way of the Roman Empire.

If you know your history, this is not an insult; but, rather, a tragedy in progress. The P-LC was a powerful and progressive state during the early Reformation era, reaching its Golden Age in about 1575.

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

Note the sidling up to the chosen audience by characterizing an entire group of people "the GOP" as if they are all identical to one another.  This is a valid representation of what a person who lives a House of Mirrors existence actually sees in those around them -- no difference one to another, because they are all reflections of him/herself. 

The opening sentence here is brilliant in that it instantly and efficiently says, "Listen to me because I'm just like you." 

The rest of the historical thesis in this article is a brilliant analysis, considering the point of view. 

Take a Character who shares this writers contempt and disdain for those who see things differently and create some Events that would shatter his certainty that his view is the only laudable view.

It doesn't matter what views your Character holds, or opposes.  The writing exercise is to Depict a Conflict of Values and its Resolution. 

It will work better as a Novel if you choose some vast conflict of World Shattering importance that is utterly unrelated to the headlines of today.  Just lift out of this article the attitude of this writer -- not the content.

Your task is to create a Character who views Others with such contempt, then discovers that what he hates in them is actually inside himself, that he never perceived them at all.  As he comes to resolve his inner conflict, he begins the journey to being able to Love himself.

Where does that lead?  It will lead him to his Happily Ever After, but not in one or even a thousand steps.  Along the way, he will discover how those he held in contempt are actually struggling as he was.  He will find Love for them, and his way of speaking of them will change (his Character will Arc).

The changed attitude will not change the facts of the Situation, but it will open vistas of opportunity for different sorts of actions to change the facts.  (yes, it's a series of novels)

Once your Character understands how lovable his opposition is, even though they are flat out wrong, his actions will begin to be instructive rather than destructive, and solutions will appear that were never visible before.

The key to Character Arc is the introduction of Love which penetrates the Mirror Effect so that one Character can actually perceive what is inside another Character.  Thus begins all Relationship.

So every novel needs a love story, even if there is no Romance.  And every Romance, to create a realistic Happily Ever After needs a Love story -- the story of learning to Love yourself so that you can see through the mirror-surface and into the people around you.

That Love Story gives the fictional world the necessary verisimilitude to draw a reader into the Fantasy world.

Here are more posts on Alien Romance discussing verisimilitude, story arc, and Romance.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/11/index-post-to-art-and-craft-of-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-5.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/12/plot-subtext-integration-part-2-ruining.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Authors Guild Suggests 50/50 Is Fair To Authors

What is fair recompense for authors when an ebook is sold through a publisher? Should an author's royalties be reduced when a retailer demands that the publisher allows the retailer to cut prices?

Authors' Guild writes:

We announced our Fair Contract Initiative earlier this summer. Now our first detailed analysis tackles today’s inadequate e-book royalties. At the heart of our concern with the unfair industry-standard e-book royalty rate is its failure to treat authors as full partners in the publishing enterprise. This will be a resounding theme in our initiative; it’s what’s wrong with many of the one-sided “standard” clauses we’ll be examining in future installments.

Traditionally, the author-publisher partnership was an equal one. Authors earned around 50% of their books’ profits. That equal split is reflected in the traditional hardcover royalty of 15% of list (cover price, that is, not the much lower wholesale price), and in the 50-50 split of publishers’ earnings from selling paperback, book club, or reprint rights. Authors generally received an even larger share than the publisher for non-print rights (such as stage and screen rights) and foreign rights.
But today’s standard contracts give authors just 25% of the publisher’s “net receipts” (more or less what the publisher collects from a book sale) for e-book royalties. That doesn’t look like a partnership to us.
We maintain that a 50-50 split in e-book profits is fair because the traditional author-publisher relationship is essentially a joint venture. The author writes the book, and by any fair measure the author’s efforts represent most of the labor invested and most of the resulting value. The publisher, like a venture capitalist, invests in the author’s work by paying an advance so the author can make ends meet while the book gets finished. Generally, the publisher also provides editing, marketing, packaging, and distribution services. In return for fronting the financial risk and providing these services, the publisher gets to share in the book’s profits. Not a bad deal. This worked well enough throughout much of the twentieth century: publishers prospered and authors had a decent shot at earning a living.How the e-book rate evolvedFrom the mid-1990s, when e-book provisions regularly began appearing in contracts, until around 2004, e-royalties varied wildly. Many of the e-rates at major publishing houses were shockingly low—less than 10% of net receipts—and some were at 50%. Some standard contracts left them open to negotiation. As the years passed, and especially between 2000 and 2004, many publishers paid authors 50% of their net receipts from e-book sales, in keeping with the idea that authors and publishers were equal partners in the book business.
In 2004, we saw a hint of things to come. Random House, which had previously paid 50% of its revenues for e-book sales, anticipated the coming boom in e-book sales and cut its e-rates significantly. Other publishers followed, and gradually e-royalties began to coalesce around 25%. By 2010 it was clear that publishers had successfully tipped the scales on the longstanding partnership between author and publisher to achieve a 75-25 balance in their favor.    The lowball e-royalty was inequitable, but initially it didn’t have much effect on authors’ bottom lines. As late as 2009, e-books accounted for a paltry 3–5% of book sales. Authors and agents ought to have pushed back, but with e-book sales so low it didn’t make much sense to risk the chance of any individual book deal falling apart over e-royalties. We called the 25% rate a “low-water mark.” We said, “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.” 
E-books now represent 25–30% of all adult trade book sales, but for the vast majority of authors the rate remains unchanged. If anything, publishers have dug in their heels. Why? There’s a contractual roadblock, for one: major book publishers have agreed to include “most favored nation” clauses in thousands of existing contracts. These clauses require automatic adjustment or renegotiation of e-book royalties if the publisher changes its standard royalty rate, giving publishers a strong incentive to maintain the status quo. And the increasing consolidation of the book industry has drastically reduced competition among publishers, allowing them more than ever to hand authors “take it or leave it” deals in the expectation that the author won’t find a better offer.
The elephant in the roomAnd then there’s the elephant in the room: Amazon, which has used its e-book dominance to demand steep discounts from publishers and drive down the price of frontlist e-books, even selling them at a loss. As a result, there’s simply not as much e-book revenue to split as there was in 2011when we reported on the e-book royalty math. At that time, publishers made a killing on frontlist e-book sales as compared to frontlist hardcover sales—at the author’s expense—because, as compared to today, the price of e-books was relatively high. 
When we analyzed e-royalties for three books in the 2011 post, “E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins,” we found that every time an e-book was sold in place of a hardcover, the author’s take decreased substantially, while the publisher’s take increased. Since 2011, we have found that publishers’ e-gains have diminished. But the author’s share has fallen even farther. Amazon has squeezed the publishers, to be sure. The publishers have helped recoup their losses by passing them on to their authors.
These were our calculations for several books in 2011. The trend was obvious. Compared with hardcovers, each e-book sold brought big gains to the publisher and sizable losses to the author when the author’s royalties are compared to the publisher’s gross profit (income per copy minus expenses per copy), calculated using industry-standard contract terms:
Author’s Royalty vs. Publisher’s Profit, 2011The Help, by Kathryn StockettAuthor’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 BaldacciAuthor’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 HillenbrandAuthor’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%
What’s happening now? We ran the numbers again using the following recent bestsellers. Because of lower e-book prices, the publishers don’t do as well as they used to, though they still come out ahead when consumers choose e-books over hardcovers. But authors fare worse than ever:
Author’s Royalty vs. Publisher’s Profit, 2015All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony DoerAuthor’s Standard Royalty: $4.04 hardcover; $2.09 e-book.Author’s E-Loss= -48%Publisher’s Margin: $5.44 hardcover; $5.80 e-book.Publisher’s E-Gain: +7%Being Mortal, by Atul GawandeAuthor’s Standard Royalty: $3.90 hardcover; $1.92 e-book.Author’s E-Loss= -51%Publisher’s Margin: $5.10 hardcover; $5.27 e-book.Publisher’s E-Gain: +3.5%A Spool of Blue Thread, by Anne TylerAuthor’s Standard Royalty: $3.89; $1.92 e-book.Author’s E-Loss: -51%Publisher’s Margin: $5.09 hardcover; $5.27 e-book.Publisher’s E-Gain: +3.5%[1]
Exceptions to the ruleIt’s time for a change. If the publishers won’t correct this imbalance on their own, it will take a critical mass of authors and agents willing to fight for a fair 50% e-book royalty. We hope that established authors and, particularly, bestselling authors will start to push back and stand up to publishers on the royalty rate—on behalf of all authors, as well as themselves.There have been cracks in some publishers’ façades. Some bestselling authors have managed to obtain a 50% e-book split, though they’re asked to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep these terms secret. We’ve also heard of authors with strong sales histories negotiating 50-50 royalty splits in exchange for foregoing an advance or getting a lower advance; or where the 50% rate kicks in only after a certain threshold level of sales. For instance, a major romance publishing house has offered 50% royalties, but only after the first 10,000 electronic copies—a high bar to clear in the current digital climate. But overall, publishers’ apparent inflexibility on their standard e-book royalty demonstrates their unwillingness to change it.We know and respect the fact that publishers—especially in this era of media consolidation—need to meet their bottom lines. But if professional authors are going to continue to produce the sort of work publishing houses are willing to stake their reputations on, those authors need a fair share of the profits from their art and labor. In a time when electronic books provide an increasing share of revenues at significantly lower production and distribution costs, publishers’ e-book royalty practices need to change.

---

[1] In calculating these numbers and percentages for hardcover editions, we made the following assumptions: (1) the publisher sells at an average 50% discount to the wholesaler or retailer, (2) the royalty rate is 15% of list price (as it is for most hardcover books, after 10,000 units are sold), (3) the average marginal cost to manufacture the book and get it to the store is $3, and (4) the return rate is 25% (a handy number—if one of four books produced is returned, then the $3 marginal cost of producing the book is spread over three other books, giving us a return cost of $1 per book). We also rounded up retail list price a few pennies to give us easy figures to work with.Likewise, in calculating these numbers and percentages for the 2015 set of e-books, we are assuming that under the agency model—which is reportedly the new standard in the Big Five’s agreements with Amazon—the online bookseller pays 70% of the retail list price of the e-book to the publisher. The bookseller, acting as the publisher’s agent, sells the e-book at the price established by the publisher. The unit costs to the publisher are simply the author’s royalty and the encryption and transmission fees, for which we deduct a generous 50 cents per unit.    

I wonder why Amazon's rates are taken as 'Settled" when it comes to ebook prices, but their royalty split with self published authors.... is not?

Not seriously.

Rowena Cherry

Congress, Close Those Pirate-Friendly Loopholes, Please!

For the benefit of authors and interested readers of this blog who are not members of Authors' Guild, I am sharing recent news from the Guild.

Dear Member, 

This week, we sent a letter to Congress asking for help in fighting piracy, which affects us all. Authors care about e-book piracy. We hear this increasingly from our members. From 2009 to 2013, the number of Internet piracy alerts we received increased over 300%. In the next year alone, from 2013 to 2014, it doubled. 

There is a direct connection between e-book piracy and authors’ pocketbooks. The publishing industry as a whole loses $80 to $100 million to piracy annually, according to the Association of American Publishers. Many publishers have the resources to adjust their business models to absorb piracy-related losses, but individual authors don’t. Each time a standard frontlist e-book is pirated rather than purchased through a normal retail channel, its author forgoes what would have been nearly $2 in royalties. This adds up and make a real dent in the typical author’s earnings. (According to our recent survey, median writing-related income for full-time authors in 2014 was only $17,500.) 

Despite many publishers’ implementation of anti-piracy software and technological protection measures, the problem continues to grow. According to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the effectiveness of protection measures is limited by “business models built entirely around manufacturing and distributing technologies, software, devices, components, or tools, or around providing services, to gain unlawful access to the content or to copy it without authorization.” 

So we’re asking Congress to do something about it. This letter, addressed to the House Judiciary Committee (which is spearheading a review of U.S. copyright law), reminds members of Congress that Internet piracy directly harms authors’ ability to make a living. It asks them to consider key changes to the U.S. Copyright Act to give authors a productive remedy for online infringement—not the ineffective, Sisyphean system currently in place, known as “Notice and Takedown.” 

Court decisions have construed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Notice and Takedown provisions to mean that a copyright owner is required to send a notice for each separate instance (i.e., copy) of infringement, specifying the URL. But as soon as a pirated copy is taken down, it is usually put right back up. Needless to say, copyright owners cannot keep up with this senseless game, and individual authors do not begin to have the resources to send a new notice every time a pirated copy is posted or reposted. 

We are asking for a “Notice and Stay-Down” regime: once a webhost knows a work is being infringed, it should not continue to receive “safe harbor” immunity from claims of infringement unless it takes reasonable measures to remove all infringing copies of the same work. 

You can help supplement our efforts to create more awareness among members of Congress by contacting your Representative to express your support for this change. Feel free to pass along our letter or write your own. And, as always, if you’ve been a victim of Internet piracy, let us know at staff@authorsguild.org.

Full link to the letter: 

http://hosting-source.bm23.com/896/public/Letter_to_Judiciary_Comm._7.9.15.pdf

Do read the letter. It calls out Google Play and the pirated works posted there. I've seen illegal ebook versions of my works posted on other sites with false release dates and false publisher information. 

Like this: (But, I wouldn't visit lacumbre if I were you!)

http://www.lacumbre.com/review-714-498-forced_mate_god_princes_of_tigron_1_/

Publisher

Transworld

Publication date

28th August 2014

ISBN

0505526018

Length

326 pages

Categories

Thrillers

I've never had a contract with Transworld and the book is not a "Thriller". It was released as a paperback, and only as a paperback by Dorchester Publishing's "LoveSpell" imprint.

More anon.

Rowena Cherry

Supernatural Creatures Out of the Coffin

I've just finished rereading SUNSHINE, a fantastically good vampire novel by Robin McKinley. Like Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series and Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stackhouse series, SUNSHINE depicts an alternate version of our world in which vampires, werewolves, and other nonhuman beings are "out," their existence publicly known. It's interesting to see how differently various authors handle this premise. In Hamilton's and Harris's fiction, vampires and other creatures enjoy varying degrees of acceptance, more so in Harris's than Hamilton's, because of the availability of artificial blood in the world of Sookie Stackhouse. McKinley's version is much darker. SUNSHINE takes place in a North America ravaged by the Voodoo Wars, still in the process of rebuilding. Magically tainted "bad spots" and ruined cities seem far more common than safe havens. Supernatural beings, collectively called the Others, incite suspicion or, more typically, horror. Vampires are worst of all. Even human magic-users are regarded with wariness and have to register their existence. A government agency called the Special Other Forces—SOF—monitors the Others and strives to protect ordinary citizens from them.

Since this novel was published after 9-11, I'm certain the analogy between SOF and Homeland Security isn't accidental. All Others are feared and shunned, even though not all of them are dangerous, just as not all members of certain religions and ethnic groups are terrorists. TVTropes labels fear and loathing of imaginary scapegoated groups in fantasy and SF "fantastic racism":

Fantastic Racism

We're all familiar with STAR TREK's IDIC ideal of rejoicing in diversity. The original STAR TREK portrayed an Earth civilization that had moved beyond racial and national prejudice, with a black woman on the bridge and Chekov, a representative of the Cold War enemy of that era, shown as a valued member of the crew. In the first season, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy befriended a nonhumanoid "monster" with silicon-based biology, who looked like an ambulatory rock. Throughout the various series and movies, we saw characters of many different planets and species working together for the greater good.

Does contemplation of fantastic racism have any impact on actual racism? Does appreciation of STAR TREK and other works that undercut prejudice against aliens or supernatural creatures transfer over to real life? Does a fan of such literature and films necessarily hold more generous attitudes toward mundane "Others"? Are SF fans typically more open to ethnic and cultural diversity in their everyday lives than the general population?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story Part 1 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story
Part 1
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

I talk a lot on this blog about how to depict character -- not just characterization, but how to show-don't-tell the "strength" of a character.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/08/reviews-9-sex-politics-and-heroism.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/greed-is-good.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html

One of the signatures of "strength" (as Editors define it when asking for "strong" characters) is the clearly defined "story arc" that the character travels throughout the story.

If you've been watching the USA series SUITS (on their "characters welcome" presentation) you have noted how, in the season finale in March 2015, showed couples finally articulating the emotions the viewers had seen were developing.

That finale came complete with a marriage proposal.

SUITS is a series about high-powered lawyers eviscerating each other while struggling to hang onto some kind of code of decency. 

It is not a love story.  It is not a Romance.  It is, however, all about Character Arc.

And it has been renewed for a summer 2015 run.

The show is also made available on streaming services, such as Amazon Prime.

Why do these high-profile dramas always tiptoe around the edges of a love story, even when they are about something incompatible with couple-formation?

The vague, general answer to that question is "verisimilitude" -- to make the created world of the characters seem like reality, so vastly un-real things can happen and seem real.

In real life, characters are people.  People have strong times in life, and weak times in life, and just slogging along day to day times in life.  Life goes in cycles.  Not all of a real life is a "story" -- your life's story is laced through the Events in your life, but most of life is not eventful.  Sometimes non-eventfulness is just what you want most.

A novel or TV Series, though, focuses on the periods of the main character's life when Events are hammering at the Character.  Some Events break the character in half and leave him/her helpless, and other Events temper the Character's strength.

We relate to those life segments because we have lived through them, or helped someone through them, or been elated or devastated by someone we know going through them.

Life is hard.  We all know that.  We go to fiction to look at life from a perspective that reveals how to survive, how to win, how to get to our own idea of "Happily Ever After."  The first thing we learn, reading our first juvenile fiction, is it is possible to win against all odds. 

A little older, we learn about the Character traits that merit winning.

After that, fiction opens up, no longer YA, no longer aimed at a particular age group but aimed at a personality type that is at a particular emotional maturity level.  Thus Genre is born, created by marketers looking to sell a stream of identical products. 

That's what books (or TV Series Episodes) are.  They are all identical, yet each is new and different.

So the life-lessons are sequenced and marketed to people at various maturity levels looking to get away from the rut of daily life and experience what it would be like to break through to the next higher maturity level.

How does a writer deliver that experience of "the next higher maturity level" without turning preachy, intellectual, abstract, philosophical, boring?

The most effective method for delivering an entertaining life-elevating experience to a reader is Character Arc.

The writer starts with a Character whose age, gender, spiritual awareness, politics, values, and life-situation resembles the intended reader's -- but differs enough so the reader can adopt an objective (this is not me) attitude.

That's paragraph one - or the infamous narrative hook.  The narrative hook has to be  fabricated out of the theme, the character, and the character's internal and external conflicts. 

Page One delivers an Event -- not necessarily a Life Event, but a Change of Situation.

Something happens, but not to the main Character.  On Page One the reader learns which character is the Main Character because the Main Character is the character whose actions happen TO someone else.  As in chess, the player playing White makes the first move.  The character who is arcing makes the first move, and thus becomes the Main Character.

Now, why does that Main Character have to be involved in a Love Story?

Love Story is not sex.  It is not Romance.  It is more like "Velcro of the soul" -- it is opening your heart and soul to another, becoming involved in that other's emotional, intellectual and spiritual life, values and Character Arc.

A Love Story is not just a story.  It is a plot.  The plot of the story, the internal conflict.

Look again at SUITS.  The pilot episode involved one guy (the Main Character) getting suckered into doing a drug-drop by a so-called friend, running for his life, and accidentally plunging into a job interview (all in a big hotel) where a Law Firm was interviewing for associates.  It turns out, being a Lawyer was his youthful aim in life.  He gets the job despite not having the proper degree and officially passing the Bar.

The guy who hires him does not love him.  He's into women.  But through the impact they have on each other, they learn to love themselves, and now (2015 seasons) Romance is ripening into Marriage.  That is story-arc.  One character's internal world changes because of the impact of being deeply involved in another character's internal world.

STORY is the sequence of emotions the Character experiences.  PLOT is the sequence of events outside the character that reflects and makes visible to the reader/viewer what is going on inside the Character.  Proposing Marriage brings Story and Plot together in one scene.

Keeping in mind that LOVE is not about sex, not about Romance, not about Winning or Losing or Commanding or Demanding or Controlling, we need to look at what Love is exactly so that we can see why every novel, TV Series, or story of any sort needs a thread woven through it that depicts Love. 

The simple answer is just verisimilitude -- to make any story powerful, there has to be something in it that "rings a bell" or resonates with the reader/viewer.  The fictional world has to have something in it that resembles reality -- then you can do anything and make it believable.

If Love is included, you achieve two objectives with a few spare words.  You create that verisimilitude, and you depict a world where happiness is possible (even if it doesn't exist).  Check out the TV Series Once Upon A Time about a world where Happiness exists, or does not exist.

We all want love, and most of us have experienced long stretches of years where we feel nobody loves us (least of all ourselves).  While going through such a period, it seems like a steady state -- that life will always be love-less, that nobody cares. 

That's not depression but realism.

Take a Character who is in such a period, and show-don't-tell how that Character will be able to break him/herself out of that loveless rut. 

If you, the writer, do not know how your Character can break out of a love-less life-cycle, all you have to do is check out today's major headlines, then dig into History, browse some blogs, and you will find examples of every mental/emotional state along that Character Arc. 

As a writer, you are an artist.  Artists discern patterns clearly that others see only dimly.  Artists depict what they see so vividly that others can recognize in the Art the same pattern they see in Life, but dimly.  Art triggers that wondrous AHA! moment. 

No matter what the conflict, theme, situation, your Character can triumph over all adversity by Arcing into a state of being more able to Love, more willing to Love, more open to Love.

In Part 2 of Why Every Novel Needs A Love Story, (next Tuesday)
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html
we'll look at some seriously explosive inspirational material.  Meanwhile, think carefully about how you would define love -- because without Love there is no Romance.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

True Blood on the Way?

The U.K.'s National Health Service has announced the prospect of beginning human experimental trials for manufactured blood in 2017:

Lab-Grown Blood

They're not working on an artificial product like the commercial synthetic beverage in Charlaine Harris's vampire series and the TV adaptation TRUE BLOOD, although other researchers have worked on creating synthetic blood. The NHS hopes to grow blood from stem cells. So far, they've demonstrated that red corpuscles can be generated in the lab, but only in tiny quantities, a few teaspoons at most. Mass production still lies out of reach. According to a doctor at NHS, “The intention is not to replace blood donation but to provide specialist treatment for specific patient groups.” If proven safe in the human body, even small amounts could be helpful to patients with conditions such as sickle cell anemia.

Eventually, though, it seems likely that manufactured blood cells will become available in a quantity useful for transfusions, even if that goal lies several years in the future. If so, will human donors of common blood types become unnecessary (like me, O-positive)? Or will the lab-grown product remain only a supplement to natural donations rather than a replacement?

As for vampires, the Sookie Stackhouse series implies that the undead find the synthetic product less than satisfying. Rogue vampire attacks on human victims still pose a hazard to the public, contributing to the tensions between vampire and mortal that pervade both the books and the TV program. Would blood grown from human stem cells be different, though? Would it taste and nourish enough like the real thing to allow the living and the undead to coexist without fear on either side? Of course, vampires might still desire the intimacy of feeding from live partners, but ideally that need would be supplied by willing volunteers and paid donors. It would be interesting to contemplate a world in which vampires are not only "out of the coffin" but fully integrated into society instead of legally restricted second-class citizens (and objects of either fear, loathing, or queasy fascination) as in Harris's series.

Off topic: Reverting to last week's subject, here's an essay about how parents can use INSIDE OUT to talk about feelings with their kids:

Inside Out

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Blurb Writing 101 - Part 1 - Study The Experts by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Blurb Writing 101
Part 1
Study The Experts  

I put the following into a Facebook post on the Sime~Gen Group as we were wrestling with creating the back cover copy for the upcoming Sime~Gen release, an anthology of stories by 11 writers edited by 2 other writers, not Jean Lorrah or Jacqueline Lichtenberg.   

The Facebook Group is centered on the Sime~Gen novels, but that encompasses so many topics (as a "built" world, it contains everything - and we're still building), that there is hardly anything that isn't being discussed.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/SimeGen/

The video below is about the Middle East mess, but the subject of the Facebook post is the creation of a SHORT explanation of the world I have built around the Sime~Gen Characters (which just gets more complicated as Jean Lorrah adds to it all).

To accomplish the creation of this blurb, I've been trying to teach a whole profession (which I have never mastered) to a beginner who didn't realize it is an entire profession. 

The profession is called copywriting, and/or advertising copywriting, and is the skill set needed to write cover copy blurbs for novels.

The task is to write the blurb for the back of the Sime~Gen Anthology, and that blurb will go on Amazon and other e-book distributors pitch page. 

The stories span a huge swatch of the Sime~Gen Chronology
http://www.simegen.com/CHRONO1.html
and have an enormous cast of characters. 

This task requires summarizing Sime~Gen, boiling it down, making it easy to understand. 

SHORT has never-ever-never been my forte! 

Another task on our do-list requiring "short" is the creation of a YouTube Video explaining "What Is Sime~Gen." 

So I found this video on YouTube. 

CAUTION

Do not get caught up in the subject of the Middle East Mess, but focus on the technique behind making this video.

This is the sort of image-based explanation with clear narrative that you need when you create the cover copy for your novel.

As the writer, the worldbuilder, you know too much about your world -- just as you know too much about the Middle East Conflict, about Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Liberia, Sudan, Iran, -- the list of countries is huge!

Copywriting is indeed an entire profession -- people sit at desks, pluck a folder out of their in-box, find an assignment and after briefly scanning the essential facts, they write the cover copy, or the press release, or the packaging or pitching or whatever elevator-pitch style summary of "why you should be interested in this" message.

Copywriters get paid a lot for that skill - just not enough to afford to live in Manhattan unless they work for an ad agency on a top floor corner office.

Sime~Gen is far more complex than the Middle East!  Many copywriters have tried and failed to explain it.  The one who comes the closest works for Loreful, the company that owns the rights to the Sime~Gen videogame.

The author of a "world" has to master the boil-down technique and presentation technique you can see in this video and adapt it to their blurb problem.

This 5 minute video takes an enormously complex, sprawling, multi-layered, millions of people with trillions of opinions, and explains to "outsiders" what they are doing and why, just as if explaining the Middle East to UFO denizens from Arcturus. 

We all know more than we want to know about the Middle East criss-crossing-conflicts.  And we all harbor half a dozen or more contradictory opinions about it at once.  But who among us can visualize a graphic explanation of our own novel or series that is this succinct?

Nevermind if you think it is a correct description of the Middle East Conflict! 
SUCCINCT is what We are looking for when describing the Main Conflict of a novel or series of novels.

Here are some previous posts on conflict:

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

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/01/theme-worldbuilding-integration-part-8.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-2-conflict-and-resolution.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/09/depiction-part-3-internal-conflict-by.html

Now watch this 5 minute video and imagine it is explaining the Sime Territories being forged in Killing, in Pens, in Secret Pens, in Violence, in desperation, in Zelerod's Doom to produce a situation that can pass for "peace" in the History Books.  \

Here's a handy source of Sime~Gen books in an Amazon store -- you can click through the titles to read the Amazon blurbs, many of which I wrote.

http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20

Be sure not to focus on the content or veracity of this video's opinionated and one-sided explanation.  Re-post it on your own Facebook Wall and intro with your opinion of the content, but here focus on the technique used to distill a situation you understand into a simple, 5 minute graphic. 

Focus on how the "stock" images in the video are used to make a point, and how that one point is sifted out of the background and brought into focus then repeated. 

You know how complicated that real-world background is.  Focus on the technique required to simplify it into this video -- and on how the video was scripted and made. 

Yes, we will need 2 videos for Sime~Gen if we use this technique! One from the Sime point of view, and one from the Gen point of view!

Maybe more: from the junct point of view, from the disjunct point of view, from the non-junct point of view, from the towner point of view, from the Householder point of view, from the "converts" to Householding lifestyle point of view. 

Point of view is what makes this YouTube video SIMPLE.  Study how narrow that view is, and how sharply the point is made because of that.  You can tell easily because you will react strongly to what this video does not say. 

As in music, SILENCE is the most powerful element, the element that structures the art.  In narrative fiction, what is not said is often far more powerful than what is said.

https://youtu.be/8EDW88CBo-8

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

6 Pentacles - What Goes Around Comes Around

As noted previously, this is a chapter in a book about the Tarot aimed at Intermediate students of Tarot, not beginners or advanced students. It is particularly aimed at writers looking to learn World Building and Alien Character building.

Updated and expanded compilation of all these Tarot Just For Writers entries is now available on Kindle:

The Wands and Cups Volumes and  the Swords and Pentacles Volumes, are now all available separately on Kindle.  The 5 Volumes combined are also available on Kindle as one book, cheaper than buying them individually.

The Not So Minor Arcana: Never Cross A Palm With Silver Aug 30, 2015 99 cents
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0108MC26O

The Not So Minor Arcana: Wands Sept. 1, 2015  99 cents
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0106RVPKU

The Not So Minor Arcana: Cups Sept. 11, 2015 99 cents
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0106SATX8

The Not So Minor Arcana: Swords  Sept. 17, 2015 99 cents
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0100RSPM2

The Not So Minor Arcana: Pentacles  Sept. 21, 2015 99 cents
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0106RVKF0

The Not So Minor Arcana: Books 1-5 combined Sept. 24, 2015 $3.25
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010E4WAOU

This series is designed not for the beginner or the advanced student, but for the intermediate student and specifically for writers doing worldbuilding..

---------------

And Remember: The meaning of a Tarot Minor Arcana resides in the placement on the Tree of Life (i.e. the number on the card) integrated with the "World" or Suit of the card.
For the Tree of Life and the Jacob's Ladder diagrams see:

http://web.onetel.net.uk/~maggyw/treeladder.html

I don't really go with the way this page explains the Tree, but it is worth thinking about. There are many other ways. For now, ponder the diagrams on this page or Google up some others.

I have been posting here since August 14th, 2007, every Tuesday, the 10 minor Arcana of the suit of Swords. The Ace of Pentacles was posted Oct 23, 2007. The 3 of Pentacles was accidentally posted dated Monday November 5th.

---------------

6 Pentacles

What goes around comes around. Yep, I'm still on cliches.

As much as the 5 of Pentacles is about isolation, loneliness and being unable to get anyone to listen, unable to get psychological validation from another human being, the 6 of Pentacles is about connectivity.

6's are about Love, and how love opens the psyche to receive Beauty.

The shock-and-awe of the apperception of the Beauty which fuels the Universe is the essence of 6, the center of the Tree of Life.

Look at the Jacob's Ladder diagram. We are now talking about the 3rd circle up from the bottom of the MIDDLE column.

Under that 6 of Pentacles lies the 10 of Swords, so these two processes are related harmonics.
6 of Pentacles is immensely complicated because it is in fact so very simple. It is love. We've grappled with this before, discussing the 6 of Swords.

In Swords, we did not discuss how the 6 of Swords overlays the 10 of Cups, and is overlain by the Ace of Pentacles. We just tried to tease out the meaning of 6 Swords without getting so complicated.

The 10 of Cups is a vast and stable emotional joy -- a psychological stability. The 6 of Swords is a journey to start over somewhere else, despite dragging your habits with you (good or bad habits, you drag them everywhere).

The Ace of Pentacles is the start of materializing something new (not always good, just materializing whatever project you've been working on).

Here in the 6 of Pentacles, we hit the 6-note again, harmonizing with the previous 6's and bringing it all down into concrete manifestation.

How do you concretize G-d's love?

Well, a good start is Charity.

But mostly people think of Charity as giving to those less fortunate, those who have less. And its often just physical things that get donated.

But very often, the most meaningful kind of Charity is done just within your own mind, quietly inside your thoughts and opinions, your thought-habits (10 Swords).

Political correctness requires that we not judge people's values, and most especially that we not judge on a double standard.

But it's very possible that true Charity requires a double standard.

Not everyone can do what you have done -- so should you require everyone to measure up to the standard by which you judge yourself?

Look at it backwards. If you find yourself wanting, should you necessarily judge others by a higher standard?

And some people "put others on a pedestal" in order to devalue themselves.

But if you judge everyone against the same standards, you aren't "handicapping" (as in golf or gambling). You aren't allowing for the inherent differences among us.

Charity may in fact mean that you judge each person you meet against their own ideal condition. But of course, you not being Infinitely Wise, can't possibly know what that ideal condition is. In fact, you can't know what your own ideal condition is!

So what are we to do? Not judge anyone? Political correctness indicates that one should not ever pass value judgements.

Wouldn't it be nice if life were that simple? One rule that always applies.

Something about that idea makes me suspicious.

If life were that simple, would the Tarot deck need so many cards to describe the process of living?

In the 5 of Pentacles, we experienced solitude, loneliness, and learned self-reliance. We learned to get rid of some of our emotional baggage and other clutter to make room for that which others value.

That housecleaning left us able to re-enter social interaction after the long, quiet building process of 4 Pentacles.

What we built in 4 Pentacles we are now able to SHARE with others by accepting into the spot emptied by housecleaning, what they have to share with us.

So maybe we can't judge the value systems other live by as better or lesser than our own. So maybe all we can judge is how compatible someone else's values are with our own -- at this particular time.

Everyone changes all the time, though we change within the parameters delineated by our natal charts. We can become a better example of our self, but we can't become someone else or live someone else's life.

However, at any given moment, we can respond to compatibility -- that what the Other has to share fits nicely into the empty spot within us while what we have to share fits into their empty spot.

Cliche: You scratch my back; I'll scratch yours.

And that's the Giving and Receiving contract represented by 6 Pentacles.

Once again, the Waite Rider deck images miss the point somewhat. The essence of Charity is not the wealthy giving to the poor. The essence of Charity is the Social Contract. It's not about what I have and what you have -- it's about what we have.

Yeah, love is a contract -- a legal contract! Isn't that awful?

But in a way it's true. Every human interaction is based on a contract of some sort -- a "you do this; I do that" contract.

Mystically, G-d came to Avram and said, "Come walk in my ways and I'll make of you a great nation." That's a contract. And again at Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments were given as a contract -- you do this; I'll do that. G-d interacts with humankind via a legal contract.

All human relationships mirror that, as do all civilizations.

The contract part is the concrete part, the Pentacles part of the deal.

6 is Love, the love of Beauty and the Beauty of love.

The contract of love is reciprocity -- to allow one's self to be affected, changed, as much as one offers to affect the other.

For the most part, the terms of the contract of love are unspoken, mostly subconscious and therefore un-speakable because you, yourself, don't know your own terms -- and therefore the whole contract is subject to misunderstanding.

That misunderstanding often manifests as co-dependence, sometimes in a healthy way, and sometimes not. See 5 Swords again.

So 6 Pentacles is about the individual's pairing contract mirroring the social contract which mirrors the mystical contract the Creator made with humankind.

So to figure out the 6 of Pentacles, we have to start at the top, the origin.

As we discussed in Swords, creation was Created by a Word. Much later, we learned what that Word was about via the Ten Commandments.

It's no co-incidence there are 10 Sepheroth of the Tree of Life and 10 Commandments. Trust me, no coincidence at all!

We learned that if we follow these 10 simple rules, there will be Abundance. Vast Abundance! The Universe is Abundant. It's a Law and part of the Contract. (remember the Swords discussion of the Zero Sum Game model vs. the model of Abundance).

So how come there are poor people and rich people? And the richest aren't always the best at following Commandments!

The theory is (more mysticism here) that the vast abundance flows into the world unevenly, and some people are challenged (remember, you can't judge other people very well, being a person yourself) to develop ways of redistributing the extra that they get. Yeah, being rich is (cliche!) no bed of roses.

Conundrum: If you find that you need to get more, the way to get more is to GIVE more.

So those who start out with extra and figure out how to give, (it's not that easy - look at the celebrity-gossip headlines!) find they have even more than they started with.

But it's also true that some of those who start out with too little have become prosperous after doing Charity.

Remember the movie where the fellow will inherit a fortune if he can figure out how to spend a million dollars in a short time? It was a comedy, but could be remade as an Alien Romance.

We all know from experience that giving doesn't bring more right away.

You can't (usually) get by deliberately giving for the purpose of getting.

Remember the discussion in 5 Pentacles of discarding some of the irrelevant bits accumulated in 4 Pentacles? You discard what you don't need to make room to accept something from someone else, something they cherish (an idea, a value, a joy, whatever).

Relationships are established and nurtured by exchanging such personal bits of individuality.
One of the most difficult principles of Kabbalah is Giving and Receiving. Receiving is very likely the single most difficult occult concept of all.

6 Pentacles is the process during which we complete the circuit with G-d, receiving the Love He gives and giving to others in reflection of that. This process leaves us more and more capable of loving G-d.

This process is not so simple. How many of us are even capable of letting ourselves be loved by another human being, never mind the Creator of us all?

It's a pump - you have to prime it.

Young people today don't know how to prime a pump -- all their sinks come with faucets and their cars don't have carburetors. How are they supposed to learn about love?

Well, by attempting to participate in giving and receiving, even by deliberately giving in order to get, we start to open ourselves up.

It is a stepwise process, taking many lifetimes. Eventually Pentacles can be understood in a whole new light. (when I get there, I'll let you know what color that light is)

Story characters, just like some people, often set out to get rich, to make money, to amass wealth. We like to read stories about the wantonly rich. The TV Show Colombo was about an ordinary Los Angeles Detective who investigated murders among the grandly wealthy the city is known for. His rumpled trenchcoat became an icon!

There is a fascination in how the "other half" lives. And in the USA, it is possible for the poorest among us to become the richest. So we're fascinated to a purpose.

Often, wealth is chosen as a goal. And we read many stories about people who became "hard-hearted" as they pursue that goal.

Cliche: Money Is The Root Of All Evil.

How can that be if one whole quarter of Jacob's Ladder, the path to Heaven, is formed of Pentacles? The Suit of Coins?

What's wrong with wanting to be rich?

Nothing, unless you choose having a lot of money as a goal.

Maybe that's the whole secret of it! Wealth is not a goal. It is a side-effect. Wealth is a side-effect produced by the pursuit of self-knowledge and spiritual health that lets you love and let yourself be loved.

Remember, Jacob's Ladder is the conduit down which G-d's love flows into the world, and it is also the circuit diagram of human personality-soul-spirit.

Perhaps wealth is chosen as a goal by those who despair of ever knowing love. Or perhaps they believe if they're rich enough, they'll be loved.

How many Romance novels involve a young woman yearning for the rich scion of a Titled family?

If wealth is chosen as a goal in itself, you may achieve it and never know you've made it. Or you may think you have it made only to have it all evaporate. Or you may star in one of those movies where the elderly Grandfather is dying in a huge four-poster bed, and the children are sniping at each other all over the mansion, vying for shares of the fortune.

We yearn for riches as much or maybe more than for love. Why is that? Why do we worship the almighty dollar which is represented in Tarot by the Suit of Pentacles?

There is a relationship between wealth and love.

When we feel G-d's love, we feel wealthy even if we don't have much. When we don't feel G-d's love, no matter how much wealth we have, we feel poor and use our wealth to batter at that internal barrier (hence celebrities with a $17,000/month party budget).

The 6 of Pentacles is all about puzzling out how that relationship between love and money works for you right now.

The key is to realize that money is not the root of all evil, but rather the conduit through which G-d's love flows into manifestation.

If you attempt to stand in the way of that downrushing flood more powerful than Niagra Falls, you will be swept away as surely as so many celebrities with wasted lives.

If you become an extension of that conduit, then the event that marks the 10 of Swords process (which underlies 6 Pentacles) will be a culmination of your actions resulting in filling you up with love to give.

Let's look in on our writer who gritted her teeth and started writing her first novel in Ace of Swords, and eventually had her packaging go all awry, then made changes, and finally began another novel in Ace of Pentacles and found herself building a career in 4 Pentacles and lost her confidence in 5 Pentacles.

Guess what's happening to her now that she's worked that second novel down to 6 Pentacles.
She's just been offered a FILM OPTION on her second book! That's 6 of Pentacles -- something you earned in a past life but didn't get, a big break, a leg up when you really need it, a boost you couldn't create for yourself, just "falls into your lap." I suspect many "rescuer" novels are primarily inspired by this kind of event half-remembered from a prior life and misunderstood in today's model of the universe.

To others our writer's good fortune looks as if a fumbling, incompetent beginning writer (they always blame the author for the cover) got unreasonably lucky with her second novel and got a film option. She couldn't possibly have earned it more than someone working for decades in the industry.

Well, she didn't earn it now. She drew some capital out of the karmic bank, or possibly a loan against collateral. Because of that, the right person for her got the editorial job and inherited her book contracts.

Or perhaps someone with a big karmic debt (not to her, but just a debt) was drawn to pay off that debt. The love that should have flowed to our writer splashed sideways and hit her new editor who happened to send an ARC to this producer who was moved to give because he loved her book.

Why did he love her book? Well, he didn't love her book. He just loved.

Now our writer is all excited and energized again, toiling away on her third and fourth books, working with self-confidence, once more sure that what she has to give will be well received.

And because she is glowing with all this love, she will do as well with these new novel contracts as her skills permit. If she worked hard enough acquiring skills before her first sale, she will now be able to deliver the goods. If not - she won't have the follow-up success needed to continue the build.

This writer has chosen as her goal to gift-wrap her heart and soul in order to give it away as stories. She has poured love into those stories, unstintingly, and when she's empty, love will pour back into her. Her chickens will come home to roost and lay many eggs.

6 of Pentacles Reversed happens when goals aren't chosen well, usually for lack of sufficient energy in the execution of plans.

6 of Pentacles Reversed feels like being held back a grade and having to repeat the lessons of giving and receiving, of charity and discipline of creating karmic credit.

In the Reversed process, wealth is not understood as a side-effect but as a goal on the road to power without self-knowledge.

It took knowledge of yourself to select the the right bits to discard in 5 Pentacles in order to re-enter the flow of the social contract in 6 Pentacles by receiving.

One last caution. Don't judge how well people are doing spiritually by how much wealth they have amassed, or by how "lucky" they are getting "all the breaks."

Someone can be doing splendidly in one area, with one project or one part of life, and be completely messed up in all the others. Humans are complex and develop unevenly -- and we all have challenges tailored specifically for our own lesson in this life right now.

The spiritually greatest among us can be the poorest or least lucky.

Remember that when you give to someone who has less money than yourself. You may be giving to the richest person on earth who simply doesn't have money for food at the moment in order to give you a chance to tap into abundance. You would be wise to give with respect.

There is no one answer that will work for everyone. Your right answer today will not be right tomorrow - because you will change. We'll look into that in 7 Pentacles.

But the basic principle is always there and objectively true. The universe is made out of love, and it's love that holds it all together via the social contract.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://www.simegen.com/jl/