ANTI SOCIAL MEDIA Part 1

Not everything is anti-social.

Kudos, for instance, to Publishers Weekly (PW) for making their digital publication available.
https://www.digitalpw.com/digitalpw/20200323/MobilePagedReplica.action?pm=2&folio=COVER#pg1

Many authors are turning increasingly to social media, and to platforms such as Zoom, since live book launch events, book signings, readings, conferences and so forth are being cancelled.

The Authors Guild shared a guide for writers and authors on You Tube on how to use Zoom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X5qZBoGvWE&feature=youtu.be

The Electronic Freedom Foundation has shared some useful information about Zoom (and the information they retain about their users).
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/what-you-should-know-about-online-tools-during-covid-19-crisis

Like "the parson's nose" (more widely known in America as "the curate's egg"), offerings from The EFF tend to be good in parts.

And then, there is the Bah, Humbug! stuff.

For instance, allegedly, there are many online sites that appear to offer visitors choices about how much they agree to be tracked, and targeting with advertising, but according to sources, the clickable link is the internet equivalent of a placebo. It does nothing.

David Zetoony,  writing for Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP explains.

Original.
https://www.bclplaw.com/en-GB/thought-leadership/what-percentage-of-opt-in-cookie-consent-banners-ignore-visitors-choices.html

Lexology Link.

Then, there is the bad review, and what can you do  (as pertains to hotels on the receiving end).

Blogging globally for the Australia- based law firm Baker McKenzie, lawyers Graeme Dickson,  Andrew Stewart, Kerrie Duong, and Nicholas Kraegen discuss entertaining and scurrilous examples of probably false and defamatory observations made on social media by anonymous "reviewers".

Original
https://bakerxchange.com/rv/ff005ab4c2f4a024e609e3a0ac479512f6dbb38e

Lexology Link.

Presumably, if the reviewer actually captures a bed bug or two, and keeps them for proof, and also takes date stamped photographs of the damage inflicted to the body by the alleged bed bugs, there's not a lot the hotel can do.

Authors may extrapolate.

Some authors in a discussion forum have recently noticed the appearance of probably malicious sites with names that differ from that of the widely-trusted Facebook by a mere character or two. Beware "facedbook" links, for example.

Legal blogger Sandy Zhang, writing for Eaglegate discusses "the lawsuit that is shaking up the tech world" in which Facebook sues a cheap domain name seller, instead of going after small time name-squatters and phishers.

Original
https://eaglegate.com.au/resources/news/articles/facebook-unleashes-legal-hounds-against-deceptive-web

Lexology Link.

EFF, also has something interesting to say about phishing and scams when people are feeling vulnerable and online more than ever before.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/phishing-time-covid-19-how-recognize-malicious-coronavirus-phishing-scams

It's a very good guide!

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

Risk Assessment and Fear

So schools, bars, restaurants, theaters, concert venues, casinos, etc. in Maryland have been ordered to close, and gatherings of more than fifty people are forbidden. Both of the cons I was scheduled to attend this spring have been canceled, sadly but inevitably. While of course we'll obey the official edicts and exercise prudence in daily life, I can't help thinking some reactions are overkill. The panic-buying, for instance, aspects of which baffle me. Bottled water stripped from store shelves, when there's no threat to the drinking water supply? We have electricity, running water, heat, and cable and aren't at risk of losing them. Major retailers reassure us that there's no long-term shortage, only a distribution problem that will clear up rapidly if people stop panic-buying. If everybody would just buy what they require for a week or two at a time, the stores could keep up, and we'd all be able to get what we need.

It's a familiar truism of human psychology that we overestimate rare dangers and underestimate common ones. The extraordinary threats draw attention BECAUSE they're rare. Here are two short pieces on that tendency:

Jared Diamond on Common Risks

Drawing the Wrong Lessons from Horrific Events

As is often pointed out, we're far more likely to get into a car accident driving to the airport than to die in a plane crash. We're more at risk of injury or death in traffic on the way to the big-box store than of exposure to the coronavirus (in this region, at least). The population of Maryland is about six million. Our county has a population of 573,000. As of Monday, there are 37 confirmed cases in Maryland, only two in this county. Since members of our family haven't traveled abroad lately or come into contact with anyone who has, our individual risk of crossing paths with the virus is near zero. Yet the daily deluge of breaking news still makes me anxious (mainly, on a personal level, about being unable to restock the items we need for daily living), and to stop brooding over it takes real effort.

Psychologist Steven Pinker has a section on phobias in his HOW THE MIND WORKS. He notes that almost all phobias (irrationally exaggerated fears) fall into a few categories, derived from things that threatened our prehistoric ancestors. Hence our common fears of spiders and snakes, even though most species encountered in urban areas of North America are harmless to humans. "Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us." Instead of spiders and snakes, we should be afraid of "guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs." While we may exercise sensible caution about such things, most of us aren't terrified of them (although driving-phobic people do exist, and transportation assistance is available for those who can't force themselves to drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland). For every freeway-phobic person, large numbers suffer from fear of flying, despite the greater safety of the latter mode of travel.

In C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, senior devil Screwtape reminds his nephew Wormwood that "precautions have a tendency to increase fear." When standard precautions become routine, however, "this effect disappears." (Think how blase we've become about airport security lines. I remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and non-flying companions could accompany departing travelers right up to the gate.) Screwtape advises Wormwood to keep the "patient" obsessing over all sorts of extra things he can do "which seem to make him a little safer" and can be developed into "a series of imaginary life-lines" in response to imagined potential developments. (Accumulating a hoard of bottled water even though there's no threat to the public supply?) Earlier in the book, Screwtape points out that "real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible."

One of my favorite Lewis quotes comes from an essay he wrote in answer to the question, "How are we to live under the threat of the atomic bomb?" It's a longish passage, but I think it's worth reproducing here:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. 'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

As a last resort, we could reread Daniel Defoe's A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, Stephen King's THE STAND, or Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK and remind ourselves our current plight isn't nearly so bad as that, nor is it likely to become so.

In case you have time to watch a video of about six minutes, here's a calming message from a layman of our church—with a Maine Coon. Cats make everything better:

Jeff Conover

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How to Use Tarot and Astrology in Science Fiction Series Part 6 - Confronting Change

How to Use Tarot and Astrology in Science Fiction Series

Part 6

Confronting Change

Previous parts in How to Use Tarot and Astrology in Science Fiction Series are indexed at the bottom of the index post about Astrology

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html

In 2020, we are up against the forces of change focused on governments, country sovereignty, borders being moved, annexation of lands, ousting of Kings, plus the looming promise of major shifts in how management decisions are made -- Big Data plus Artificial Intelligence.

Privacy seems gone as facial recognition (however flawed) is deployed.  The recent Coronavirus mutation brought scenes of people marching down airport corridors, outlined by a camera that revealed their body temperature (looking for those running a fever).

The world has already changed -- most haven't noticed it yet.

Humans are averse to change.  Just ask a two year old!

Humans want "the world" to function the way they think it does.

On the other hand, people also want to change the world to make it function the way they want it to function, not as they think it does right now.

On the third hand, people change their opinions throughout a lifetime.

In Part 5 of this series, we looked at "The Story of a Life" -- biography.

The closer a fictional narrative resembles the form and shape of a real life, the more informative and thought-provoking it will be for readers.

The Generational Novel or Series, or Vampire Romance, novels with settings that span long story-arcs, centuries in Time, can put the reader's current world into a new perspective, suggesting new solutions to a reader in a quandary about their current life.

The narrative selected and spun by current news media is not the only narrative in dynamic play at any given moment because generations overlap, interpenetrate, and blend through transitions.

2020 is one of those blending times -- and it could be this whole decade that reveals the swirling dynamic change.

People living through this see it from the perspective of their own generation, and each sees a portion of the truth (like the Blind Men And The Elephant -- though I'd expect the Blind Women and the Elephant to reveal a different story).

Right now, the media portrait of the world appears to be ramming many countries, including the USA, into civil war or some semblance of blood in the streets.

People living through this, people who are your audience looking for you to escort them one an adventure into a different world, are disturbed by the daily confrontation with CHANGE in their everyday life.

In January, 2020, during the Trump Impeachment trial in the Senate, the following article was sited on Facebook:

https://www.newsweek.com/us-showing-many-genocide-warning-signs-donald-trump-expert-very-worried-1483817

-----quote-------
Politically though, Tannehill noted the U.S. trend towards divisive rhetoric and policies under President Donald Trump, who has been repeatedly accused of various forms of racism and has pursued a nativist agenda.

"The politicians enacting it are populists who benefit from stirring Us vs. Them narratives, placing blame for the woes of the nation on others who are somehow less worthy," she wrote. "They yearn for a mythological past [without] these people. It's a highly viable tactic for shoring up support."

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

Writers who study these broad trends are seeing a slide toward genocidal wars -- not just in the USA but world-wide.

This awkward trial of a sitting President is just one component of the thrust of CHANGE at the deepest level of government -- Constitutional level change.

The consensus seems to be that if what he did wasn't a crime, then it ought to be.  We have to do something about this -- that's the Pluto in Capricorn manifestation in the spotlight of media attention.

So how can a Romance writer approach the audience living through having the rug pulled out from under them?

On Facebook, I commented on a thread generated by that Newsweek article posted by someone who sees it as driving the USA toward a genocidal war, thusly:

If we accept a straight line extrapolation, yes, but humanity lurches ahead in a zigzag, often reversing course for a few centuries.

Consider this LONG PERSPECTIVE article from a Time writer.

https://time.com/5770140/millennials-change-american-politics/

That article traces the interactions between generations as Millennials sweep the reins of power from the Baby Boomer generation (as usual ignoring the Silent Generation).

I collect articles like that one on Millennials in one of my Flipboard Magazines, Pluto in Capricorn

https://flipboard.com/@jacquelinelhmqg/pluto-in-capricorn-national-narrative-so8cs2k4y

Pluto in Capricorn is the "magazine" where I collect articles of the far-far past of Ancients, current events, astronomy, astrophysics (FTL drive foundations, plus what we might discover and what we have to go explore), and space travel. That magazine also includes some genetics (most of which I put in a different magazine), Volcanos and other items that might destroy this current Ancient civilization.

PLUTO IN CAPRICORN is where we are now, and it is about CHANGE IN GOVERNMENT, shifting borders (we did that in Channel's Destiny, moved the Territory border to make room for Householdings).

This item on generation gap, shifting views, is related to a Blog post on writing craft I did a long while back:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/astrology-just-for-writers-pt-6.html

About halfway down that blog post is a list of what signs Pluto was in at various points in history and how that played out in "generation gap" thinking.

Get a good grip on this principle, and the spectacle of NEWS today will suddenly make sense.

OK, maybe not less alarming sense, but a kind of sense that clues you in on where to dodge the falling hammer of generation shifts.

It is a double-pattern, an 84 year cycle superimposed on a 248 years, with a transition superimposing one on the other every 165 years (or so).

Kids are born continuously, not usually in waves (like Baby Boomers), so the concept of "generations" all moving in the same way is nonsense, but where the outer planets are when a kid is born indicates a predilection for an affinity to a particular generation's response to life.

All that is modified by that individual kid's own characteristics then reshaped and maybe hammered by environment. None of this is cut-and-dried. Living life is an art-form.

A writer who understands how the portrait of a civilization morphs with the cycles of Pluto can build a world that seems real to people living today.

Consider, the USA is approaching the first Pluto return (to where Pluto was in Capricorn when this nation was born) in history.  With Pluto in mid-Capricorn, we created a NEW FORM of government by blending two old forms (democracy and republic) while firmly excluding the concept of Monarchy or any other form of dictatorship.

People are thinking about Civil War, but it could be an actual Revolutionary War complicated by the advent of the Internet, Artificial Intelligence, and Apple's War For Privacy From Government Intrusion (even if you're a dead criminal.)

Even science fiction writers may not be thinking "big" enough.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Search and Pay / Tweet and Pay

SEARCH AND PAY.  That's like making a rod for your own back, isn't it?

You can't make this up.
There are no depths to which some will sink to screw musicians, and if the law required internet geniuses to look up book titles and author names, and to pay royalties, maybe authors would be doing better. As it is, there are all manner of loopholes. We can learn something from how musicians are treated.

https://musictechpolicy.com/2020/03/01/mlc-metadata-showdown-whats-in-a-name-your-money/

What they do is, they change the song title ever so slightly.  You cannot find what you are obliged to look for, if you "look for it" by deliberately using the wrong search terms.

RE-TWEETING TROUBLE
Legal blogger Brooke L. Wilner, writing for Finnegan, warned recently that merely re-Tweeting someone else's infringement of copyrighted material can land the RT-happy social media user in a position of having to pay the piper (or creator).

Original
https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/blogs/incontestable/retweet-of-infringing-materials-sufficient-to-support-copyright-claim.html

WEBSITES THAT PAY FOR REVIEWS
Finally, writers' weekly-- well worth the free subscription-- sometimes lists websites that will pay for reviews. Any port in a storm might be welcome for those working from home....
https://writersweekly.com/this-weeks-article/8-websites-that-pay-for-reviews-by-karoki-githure?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=writersweekly-com-112119_67


All the best,
Rowena Cherry

Weird Insect Sex

I recently read a fun, clever SF romance called STRANGE LOVE, by Ann Aguirre. On Zylar’s world, overpopulation has led to stringent restrictions on mating and reproduction. Adults seeking mates have to participate in the Choosing, a rigorous series of trials. Having failed in four Choosings, Zylar has one more chance, or he’ll be sentenced to life as a drone, neutered and relegated to menial tasks. As the novel begins, he travels to a distant planet to meet the potential mate with whom he has been corresponding. It’s not unusual for members of his species to mate with aliens, since actual conception of offspring occurs through high-tech gene manipulation. However, a solar flare storm has damaged his ship’s AI, as a result of which he unwittingly ends up on Earth. He finds the female he mistakes for his prospective mate in the middle of an apparently devastated landscape, actually the aftermath of a battlefield reenactment weekend. He scoops up Beryl Bowman and her dog, Snaps. Even though Zylar is basically a humanoid insect, he and Beryl fall in love, and eventually they enjoy erotic intimacy despite the differences between their biology. His species has a decidedly bizarre reproductive physiology, which Aguirre based on a genus of cave-dwelling Brazilian insects.

In those four species of the tiny Neotrogla, females penetrate males with a penis-like organ called a gynosome. "Once the female has penetrated the male, her gynosome inflates, releasing a set of spines that can be used to keep the male from escaping. The sex lasts forty to seventy hours." This is a rare case in nature where the female has the ability to coerce the male into sex, the reverse of the usual power balance. In addition to collecting sperm from the male, the female receives nutritious "seminal gifts" to nourish her for the benefit of her eggs. Biologists theorize that this system evolved because of the scarcity of food in the insects' dry, barren environment. Here are a couple of articles about the weird sex lives of Neotrogla:

Scientists Discover the Gynosome

The Females Wear the Penises

In most animal species, sexual selection makes females the more choosy sex, while males will mate with any available and willing female. Those cave-dwelling insects reverse the typical pattern, with males being more picky and females competing for them. This page discusses animal sex-role reversal in general:

Wild Sex

So for SF authors who want to devise unique methods of alien reproduction, Earth biology includes potential models far odder than the well-known pregnant male seahorse—including females with "penises" and males with "vaginas." And I definitely recommend Aguirre's STRANGE LOVE; it's ingenious, suspenseful, often humorous, and sometimes sensual.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Index to How Do You Know If You've Written a Classic

Index
to
How Do You Know If You've Written a Classic

Part 1 in this Series is about writing a "classic" illustrating the long time fan discovering new entries in a series.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 2, Spock's Katra, is a long answer to a request for material for an online blog.  My answer focused on Theodore Bikel and his roles in Star Trek.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 3 answers very insightful interview questions from a Podcast host.  The verbal podcast interview is very different, but here are answers done with some time to think of how to explain the invisible connections between Star Trek, my deep study of the fan dynamics of the TV Series, and my own original universe Sime~Gen novels.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 4 - Fifty Year Test
Best Sellers made into movies or TV from the 1960's, James Clavell's Tai-Pan

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 5 - James Clavell Move Over
Current Science Fiction carrying on the classic tradition.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written_25.html

Part 6 - Romance and the Ph.D. Thesis
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 7 - How Do You Know These Two Are Soul Mates
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written_31.html

Part 8 - What Do Readers Do
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 9 - A Film Worth Watching Again

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/06/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written_9.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Willy Nilly and the Erosion of Privacy

Does personal privacy matter? Less so, it seems, in the age where a priority is put on the convenience of others and the profitability of "data", whether the subject of the eroded privacy likes it or not.

"Willy Nilly" harks back to the Old English for "will he" and "ne-will he", "ne" being the negative prefix which is not usually cited in online dictionaries. Most resources condense "ne-will" to "nill", but not all.

Millennials don't seem to mind.  Authors are accustomed to having to give up some privacy as a trade off for pursuing a career, and some authors use pen names... and sometimes, a pen name is not the guarantee of privacy that it used to be.

Perhaps, it is not a good thing for all those sites --that post disclaimers asking paid users to refrain from making employment, or housing, or lending, or other important decisions about the person whose alleged info they are selling online-- to be allowed to monetize private information.  They don't always get it right.  Even if they did get everything right, that information tends to deny persons a fair chance or a second chance.

It is divisive.

Ironically, to read a Loeb and Loeb legal blog article about privacy, you have to accept cookies.
https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2020/02/new-uspto-rule-makes-trademark-owner-email-and-mailing

Lexology link.

Loeb and Loeb LLP legal bloggers Melanie Howard, David W. Grace and Ashley Van Leer explain for the benefit of trademark owners how new USPTO rules make trademark owners' street addresses and email addresses available to the public. Authors cannot hide behind their intellectual properties attorney any more.

That is lovely for the "Person-Locator-type" internet businesses that sell personal information, and also for scammers, robocallers, spear phishers, and other common varieties of spammers... and advertisers and marketers.

By the way, on the subject of government helpfulness.... the Copyright Office will be raising many fees as of March 20th, 2020. (Not for photographers.)
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-02-19/pdf/2020-03268.pdf

Reverting to advertising and targeting, and the annoying loss of privacy, the Charles Russell Speechlys LLP  UK focused legal blog has some must-read insights into data driven online targeting.

Lexology link.

Original:
https://www.charlesrussellspeechlys.com/en/news-and-insights/insights/commercial/2020/2020-update-data-driven-online-targeting/

Legal blogger Olivia Crane does a deep dive into what data-driven online targeted advertising means, especially for Britons. This author sympathizes with Olivia Crane's unpleasant experience with shower curtains.

I had a similar experience recently with a synthetic planking product that popped up and virtually stalked me wherever I went (online).  This was after I made a purchase which I regret to this day... so where was the commercial sense in metaphorically bludgeoning me with a Lumber product?

It seems to me, the sensible advertisement targeters might be using "targeting" in much the same way as click-fraud.  "This woman recently bought a new roof for her house (usually a 15 - 30 year warrantied purchase), let's sell her name to roofers, so they can try --in vain-- to sell her a new roof!"

Most authors use Facebook, too.  The Socially Aware legal blog asks, "Are your facebook posts discoverable?"  Of course they are!
https://www.sociallyawareblog.com/2020/02/24/are-your-facebook-posts-discoverable-application-of-the-forman-test-in-new-york/#page=1

Lexology.

J. Alexander Lawrence and Lily Smith for Morrison Foerster LLP give chapter and verse on how far your privacy can be eroded and information you shared semi-privately on Facebook can be exploited and used against you in a court of law.

So, if you are ever going to sign a lease to rent a home that says "No cats", and having an illicit cat is grounds for eviction, do not post photos of your beloved cat on your Facebook page with distinctive features of said rental house in the background... for example.

Finally, for readers who love fine art, your ability to acquire anonymously is receeding, as Andrea N. Perez, writing for Carrington Coleman explains.
https://www.ccsb.com/our-firm/publish/loss-of-privacy-rights-when-purchasing-art/

Lexology.

Art lovers are presumed to be terrorists and/or money launderers until they prove otherwise according to the EU's Fifth Directive.

What an excellent book title "The Fifth Directive" would be!

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

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

Giving Self-Publishing a Bad Name

If you live in or near Maryland, you'll have heard about the scandal and criminal charges surrounding Baltimore ex-mayor Catherine Pugh's self-published series, "Healthy Holly." The books are intended to teach children about health issues such as nutrition, exercise, etc. Pugh sold $500,000 worth of them to the University of Maryland Medical System while serving on its board. She has also been accused of pre-selling books that were ultimately never printed and of sometimes selling the same hypothetical copies more than once to different customers, then not fulfilling the orders. UMMS donated its share of the books to the Baltimore City school system, which has stated that it didn't use any of them in the curriculum. Most of those copies have been warehoused rather than given to children. (In addition to the publishing-related charges, Pugh has also been convicted of fraud and tax evasion.)

Here's a timeline of the major events in the developing case, with a photo of a few of the book covers:

Healthy Holly Book Scandal

The books have been described as "clumsily" and "sloppily" written and produced. They're said to "contain grammatical and spelling errors, such as a main character’s name being spelled two different ways and the word 'vegetable' appearing as 'vegetale'." It strikes me as sad that many people may get their sole impression of self-publishing from this case.

This article goes into more detail about the series and what was done with the copies:

Just How Many "Healthy Holly" Books?

Only two of the books are listed on Amazon, as far as I could see, and neither has a "look inside" feature, so I couldn't evaluate the quality of the writing. Secondhand copies are priced at absurd levels, up to five figures. The reviews of the single book that has any (HEALTHY HOLLY: EXERCISING IS FUN) discuss the author's illegal actions, not the texts of the stories themselves. They all rate it one star except for a two-sentence five-star review, which I think is pretty funny: "I bought 50 of these and finally my rooftop deck permit got approved. 10/10 would buy again."

I'm willing to believe Pugh originally wrote and published the series with good intentions. Yet apparently the temptation of leveraging her political career to promote and sell her work overwhelmed her. Note to self: "Never use official connections to pressure readers into buying books"—not that most of us are ever likely to face such a temptation on that scale.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic Part 6 - Romance and the Ph.D. Thesis

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic

Part 6

Romance and the Ph.D. Thesis

Previous parts in "How do you know if you've written a classic?" series are:

Part 1 in this Series is about writing a "classic" illustrating the long time fan discovering new entries in a series.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 2, Spock's Katra, is a long answer to a request for material for an online blog.  My answer focused on Theodore Bikel and his roles in Star Trek.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 3 answers very insightful interview questions from a Podcast host.  The verbal podcast interview is very different, but here are answers done with some time to think of how to explain the invisible connections between Star Trek, my deep study of the fan dynamics of the TV Series, and my own original universe Sime~Gen novels.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 4 - Fifty Year Test
Best Sellers made into movies or TV from the 1960's, James Clavell's Tai-Pan
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 5
James Clavell Move Over
 Current Science Fiction carrying on the classic tradition.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written_25.html

In Part 4 of this series on Classics, we looked at James Clavell's Tai-Pan, then in Part 5 we noted James Michener's The Source which was contemporary with Tai-Pan.  Today, these works are available in all modern formats, and still noteworthy.

Science Fiction writers are still working with these grand themes, so it is easy to see how Romance blends seamlessly into Science Fiction.

The envelope theme of Romance Genre novels is the profound concept "Love Conquers All."

The word "conquers" indicates a conflict resolved and the word "all" indicates the vast universe out there that is inimical to Romance.  Any obstacle, including the prohibition against traveling faster than light, can be conquered by Love.

But "love" is not defined, leaving writers to create different definitions of love and different ideas about what "all" might be, how and why it resists the force of Love.

So at its core, Romance Genre is a Ph. D. thesis about the nature of the human being, and the world(s) that humanity is embedded in.

In other words, the very nature of reality itself.

Each world the Romance writer builds to contain a novel is actually a Ph.D. thesis - a unique, original contribution to the sum total of human knowledge.

What do you have to say that has never been said before, or never been stated in exactly this way?

Problem solving, as we've noted in previous posts, is the art of restating the problem until the problem itself reveals its own solution.

Problem solving is the art of posing questions - unanswerable questions - the Art of the Impossible.

Science Fiction is the story of solving impossible problems by expanding the realm of science.

Science Fiction is the literature of ideas.

Romance is the literature of an idea - Love Is Real.

So what exactly is love?

Choose a definition for your Characters to use and you've begun to build a world for them to live in.

As with these Classics we mentioned in Parts 4 and 5 of this series, to find the issue relevant to today's readers, look back in history - even pre-history.

Archeologists have retrieved bits of pottery and statues, foundations of buildings, tools, weapons, and artwork that reveal some of the religious convictions, and social values of civilizations long past, and peoples whose names for themselves aren't even known.  We know a lot about the elements of human nature that have never changed.

Love is one of those things - an intangible motivation so strong it can redirect a whole civilization.

We look back at the foundations of modern civilizations, and we find one of the oldest that still exists is the Judeo-Christian Bible in which the Creator of the Universe commands his people to love him, as if love is an act of will, a choice.

The Oral Torah, the first 5 books of the Bible, a memorizable song or chant,  was, according to Rabbinic tradition, given to Moses at Mount Sinai in the year 1312 BCE, one thousand three hundred twelve years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

That is only 3,332 years before this year, 2020.

In those three thousand years, our civilization has struggled to find a definition of "love," and to live by it.  Love your neighbor as yourself has proven much more difficult than anyone imagined.

Many Romance Novels have detailed how marriages can be founded on a love for an imaginary person superimposed over the real person.  Beauty and the Beast -- at some point the Beast beneath the illusion is revealed.  Or conversely, at some point, the truly lovable treasure of a person is revealed from under the illusion of a Beast.

In other words, we "project" an image onto other people, then establish an emotional reaction to our imaginary image, not the actual other person.

If humans do that today, it seems likely they did it three thousand years ago, and more.

Study the Classics we have mentioned, see how they draw the picture of human traits that persist even when presented with new problems.  Find a new problem, ripped from today's headlines, apply a human habit from thousands of years ago to that problem and generate a new solution.

There you have your Ph.D. thesis.  That is what a Best Selling Classic novel is - a unique, original contribution to human knowledge.

If the subject you choose is Love, chances are you will create a Classic Romance.  If you use the science fiction method of posing questions, chances are you will create a Science Fiction Romance that has the potential to become a Classic.

Remember, Romance is about Soul Mates teaming up to create their own unique Happily Ever After - a stable life.  The Classics we've noted declaim loudly there is no such thing as stability, or a stable life.  Those Classics don't deal directly with the Soul in all its theoretical complexity as discussed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/soul-mates-and-hea-real-or-fantasy-part.html

Romance is about doing the impossible, that which has never been done, creating stability.

It could take a Ph.D. thesis to convince a generation of young readers that stability is possible in this world, for human families and nations.


Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Just Because It Looks Like A Smutty Joke....

Just because you might dress up dissing your competition as a mildly dirty joke --even a fart joke-- does not necessarily mean that you can expect to come away from Court smelling like a proverbial rose.

That could be said to be the bottom (groan) line of an entertaining law blog article about false disparagement and the failure of a "puffery" defense.

Penned by legal bloggers Amy Ralph Mudge and Randall M. Shaheen, representing Baker & Hostetler LLP,
they really cut loose with the puns and wit, while making serious and useful points about dirty competitive strategies.
Lexology version:

Original:
https://www.adttorneyslawblog.com/advertising/butt-isnt-it-just-puffery-if-it-is-funny/#page=1

In case you wish to know, "Puffery" is the legal argument that the offensive suggestion is too ridiculous --or hilarious-- to be taken seriously by a reasonable person.
https://definitions.uslegal.com/p/puffery/

There are object lessons for writers who do their own marketing. Not every author compares his/her/their work to a rival's works in ways that compliment the rival.

Does anyone still read Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies? This writer has never forgotten the lessons of Mrs. Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By  and Mrs. Be-Done-By-As-You-Did. 

Another recent legal blog deals with truthful advertisements, from which one can extrapolate advice about comparing your products and services to those of others... or not.  Christian P. Foote, writing for Carr McClellan

Original:
http://www.carr-mcclellan.com/insights/truthful-ad-claims-product-not-implied-false-comparisons-competing-comparable-products/

Lexology:

One would have to have a major inferiority complex to sue a rival for claiming that their (the rival's) own sweet product has "no added (ingredient)" which must mean the same thing as the rival disparaging the offended party's product by suggesting it is unnatural.

Alas, some will see offensive "micro-aggression" where none was intended. The internet is full of potential for such misunderstandings.

On a positive note, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) is open to public comments on its Endorsement Guides. The guides mostly affect Influencers, but commenting is an opportunity for writers to comment publicly with wit and charm.  Your name and comment will be published.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/02/ftc-seeks-public-comment-its-endorsement-guides?utm_source=govdelivery

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

Robots Writing

The March 2020 issue of ROMANCE WRITERS REPORT (the magazine of Romance Writers of America) includes an article by Jeannie Lin about artificial intelligence programs writing prose, titled "The Robots Are Coming to Take Our Jobs." I was surprised to learn software that composes written material, including fiction, already exists. No matter how competent they eventually become, they can't quite take over our jobs yet, because (as Lin points out) U.S. copyright law requires that a work to be registered "was created by a human being." That provision, I suppose, leaves open the question of how much input a computer program can have into a work while it can still count as "created by a human being." Lin tested a program called GPT-2, which takes an existing paragraph of text as a model to write original material as a continuation of the sample work. The AI's follow-up to the opening of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE strikes me as barely coherent. On the other hand, the paragraph generated in response to a sample from one of Lin's own books comes out better, and Lin acknowledges, "The style was not unlike my own." The GPT-2, however, as Lin evaluates it, "is very limited. . . only capable of generating a paragraph of text and is unable to move beyond the very narrow confines of the lines provided."

Here's the website for that program:

OpenAI

The site claims its "unsupervised language model. . . generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization."

Here's an article about how AI writes content and some ways that technology is already being used—for instance, to produce sports reports for the Associated Press and other news outlets, financial reports, summaries of longer documents, personalized e-mails, and more:

Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Amazing Content

Computer programs have also written novels, such as an autobiographical account of the AI's cross-country travels:

AI Wrote a Road Trip Novel

It may be reassuring to read that the result is described as "surreal" and not likely to be mistaken for a human-created book.

Nevertheless, there's a National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo) competition in November for programmers trying to produce AI capable of composing novels. According to Lin's article, this challenge "has generated more than four hundred novels," although they're "more intriguing for how than were created than for their content." Here's the website for NaNoGenMo:

National Novel Generation Month

While I have no desire to cede my creative operations to a computer, I've often wished for a program that would take my detailed outline and compose a novel from it. The first-draft stage is the phase of writing I enjoy least; software that would present me with a draft ready to be edited would be a great boon. And apparently that's not an impossible goal, judging from a novel produced in collaboration between human authors and an AI, which advanced beyond the first round in a contest:

AI Novel

According to the article, "The novel was co-written by by Hitoshi Matsubara of Future University Hakodate, his team, and the AI they created. By all accounts, the novel was mostly written by the humans. The L.A. Times reported that there was about 80% human involvement." The process worked this way: “Humans decided the plot and character details of the novel, then entered words and phrases from an existing novel into a computer, which was able to construct a new book using that information.” Sounds like magic!

Still, we're in no danger of losing our jobs to robot authors yet. Aside from the novelty of the concept, I do wonder why we'd need AI-generated fiction on top of the thousands of books each year that already languish unread on Amazon pages, buried in the avalanche of new releases.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How do you know if You've Written a Classic Part 5 - James Clavell Move Over

How Do You Know If You've Written a Classic

Part 5

James Clavell Move Over 

Previous parts in "How do you know if you've written a classic?" series are:

Part 1 in this Series is about writing a "classic" illustrating the long time fan discovering new entries in a series.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 2, Spock's Katra, is a long answer to a request for material for an online blog.  My answer focused on Theodore Bikel and his roles in Star Trek.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 3 answers very insightful interview questions from a Podcast host.  The verbal podcast interview is very different, but here are answers done with some time to think of how to explain the invisible connections between Star Trek, my deep study of the fan dynamics of the TV Series, and my own original universe Sime~Gen novels.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 4 - Fifty Year Test
Best Sellers made into movies or TV from the 1960's, James Clavell's Tai-Pan
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 5
James Clavell Move Over
 Current Science Fiction carrying on the classic tradition.
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2020/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written_25.html

--------

Tor.com posted the Nebula Award Finalists, and one of my writing students has a novel on the list (bang-up great novel, too!) Marque of Caine. 

2019 Nebula Award Finalists

Novel

• Marque of Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
• A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (Tor)
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)
• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
• A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley)

Romance novels have developed a signature "style" which infuses Historical, Contemporary, and Paranormal Romance with a certain comfortable reading "feel."  Each subdivision of Romance has embroidered on that underlying "style" (style includes pacing, plotting, Characterization, Dialogue, Conflict and Resolution, etc. as well as vocabulary, grammar, syntax, punctuation etc.).

Likewise Science Fiction has a "style" and so does "Fantasy."

Embedded in the choice of style are some implicit Worldbuilding components, most especially Theme.  Theme is the one element that appears in (and dictates) every choice a writer makes, whether the writer knows it or not.

Theme is what the writer is explaining about how the universe works, what life is, where it comes from, why humans are (or are not) important to all reality.  What is Love?  How do you recognize Love?  How do you recognize the absence of Love? Does Love matter?  And what has sex to do with it (if anything)?

Each such broad question begs an answer that is equally broad, and each novel in each genre, presents an answer for readers to think and argue about, or maybe apply to their own lives.

Yes, fiction writing is dangerous.  It could lead to your Soul being held responsible for life choices made by strangers you'll never meet.

Science Fiction is one of the genres founded on asking unthinkable questions.  That was what Gene Roddenberry always said - Star Trek didn't point viewers to particular answers to age-old questions of life, but restated and posed those questions in contexts that sparked rethinking the answers handed down from generations past. In other words, Roddenberry taught that science fiction was for posing questions, not answering them.

Science is, in fact, all about the art and craft of asking questions.  And so is fiction as it takes you on a journey in another's shoes, moccasins, sandals, or even barefoot over coals.

Historical Romance as a genre has added depth and breadth of Character to the ordinary Historical novel.  Focusing on a Romance plot, a writer can ask questions about our History that other story tellers can't quite get at, questions about the meaning of life.

So James Clavell, as noted in Part 4, cast the political strife of the mid-1960's to life in the historical setting of the founding of Hong Kong, and today we see the same forces advanced through decades re-enacting the same play.

That persistence through time gives us a way to recognize a Classic Novel.

The Rise And Fall of the Roman Empire is non-fiction about politics, economics, greed, and decadence.

The point of that historical non-fiction work was simply that the biggest, most overwhelming, unbeatable, solid and Eternal organizational concepts of civilization have a finite lifespan.

Like individual humans, whole civilizations die and leave a legacy.

In the case of Rome, the legacy included much of what Rome borrowed, inherited, copied, and absorbed from Ancient Greece.  Greece, in turn, had built on legacies that can be traced to Ancient Egypt.  Empires rise and fall over centuries (some much shorter lived).  But however far they expand, they eventually contract, shatter, and die -- and descendants pick through the rubble for valuable ideas.

Learning how to view humanity through the perspective of historical epics is easier than you might think.

But it does require a lot of reading.  Along with Clavell's novel Tai-Pan, read also James Michener's novel -- (also published in the mid-1960's and still selling strong) -- THE SOURCE.

https://www.amazon.com/Source-Novel-James-Michener-ebook/dp/B00FO60CHQ/

https://www.amazon.com/Tai-Pan-Epic-Novel-Founding-Asian-ebook/dp/B07HB94TBJ/

They both have love stories, love as a motivation for the heroic deeds of grand Historical Figures, and the way personal human relationships reshape the events of History -- the things some people considered worth remembering.

Romance, however, generally concerns the things such historians don't consider worth remembering -- even though romance itself, as it occurs in the lives of great heroes and forgotten work-a-day folks, is by far and away the single most important experience of human life.

Romance is the connecting tissue between the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Source, and Tai-Pan, and it is utterly invisible in these giant classic novels about the tsunami of History spanning thousand of years.

Yes, I do think today's headlines about Hong Kong are the early rumbles of a tsunami of history that will be written about, after they've scrubbed away all the Romance.

So what if Romance writers added that Romance element back into the crafting of the narrative of human history - that is the foundation of human destiny (if the Hellenistic concept of destiny is even real).

In the science fiction genre, the most you can expect today is a Love Story, usually from the male point of view, and about what a man will do for the love of a woman.

Helen of Troy is a Classic for a reason.  Half the readers in this world are male.

So, to craft an epic future history out of Romance, study the mere Love Story and how such a story can encompass the view of History styled in such works as Clavell, Michener, etc. have used to create their Classics.

Now consider a new novel, easily viewed as a Future History such as Heinlien wrote, but with the scope and depth Edward E. Smith incorporated into his Lensman Series.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TMN61Z9/

Marque of Caine is the 5th in the series about Caine Riordan, a Polymath tumbled into the sudden opening of Earth to the interstellar civilizations out there already.

This 5th entry in the series has the style of James Clavell, the scope of James Michener, the depth of Edward E. Smith, with a heroic main character driven by a love as potent as Paris's for Helen of Troy.

In case you don't recall, Helen was desperately loved by a true Hero, but was not a woman of strong character such as we would admire today.  She just messed up the plans of great men.

Google "Who loved Helen of Troy" and find summaries such as this:

-----------
 Known as "The face that launched a thousand ships," Helen of Troy is considered one the most beautiful women in all literature. She was married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Paris, son of King Priam of Troy, fell in love with Helen and abducted her, taking her back to Troy.

During an absence of Menelaus, however, Helen fled to Troy with Paris, son of the Trojan king Priam; when Paris was slain, she married his brother Deiphobus, whom she betrayed to Menelaus when Troy was subsequently captured.

---------

Whether the women of the past were as heroic as women of today, or not, the men who wrote History often showed little respect for anything female.

Charles E. Gannon has brought the Helen of Troy character into a Heinlein style heroic woman.  Many commentators today regard Heinlein's writing as sexist -- it was, but in the way of glorifying the heroism of woman.  That, in its time, was a defiant and dangerous way to portray women, so very often Heinlein's style edges into sexism.  Charles E. Gannon faces no such restriction.

The female aliens and human women in the Caine Riordan series are portrayed freely as Characters with strengths and weaknesses as varied and unpredictable as real people.

Caine Riordan fell in love at first sight, had a brief fling with his woman that resulted in an unplanned pregnancy, and then he was swept away into the vortex of time and history.  He then spends years trying to reunite with this special woman, who is just definitely the only woman for him.

Meanwhile, she is swept away by Aliens who allegedly are trying to heal her mortal wounds.

In Book 5, Riordan plunges into the interstellar civilization tackling test after test the Aliens fling at him until at last he finds out why they are testing him, and experiences a dubious encounter with his woman which inflames his determination to rescue her.

Along the way, during all 4 previous novels, Riordan's character has been illuminated by the quality of friends he has made.  Eat this point, it is not surprising this cohort assembles to help Riordan in what seems to be just a personal quest.  The reader now understands the scope of the challenge facing Riordan.

Riordan has to win through for the sake of all humanity -- and probably a whole group of Alien species.

The haunting questions posed by the Caine Riordan novels center around why civilizations, human and maybe non-human, both rise and inevitably fall.

Why is stability so unstable?

In other words, the Caine Riordan series is addressing the issue of whether there is, or maybe could be if only we knew how, such a thing as a Happily Ever After.

The Caine Riordan series is not a Romance, but its central, core theme seems to echo Clavell, Michener, Smith, "Should there be such a thing as a Happily Ever After either for individuals or for whole civilizations?"

The Caine Riordan series is woven of the stuff from which everlasting classics are made.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Who's Got Your Authorial Back?

While not every authors' organization is as helpful as helpful can be, here are a few:

SFWA has a sample DMCA generator online.
https://www.sfwa.org/2010/07/sample-dmca-generator-for-authors/

SFWA has also been taking on trolls on Goodreads... with some success.
For authors who have given up on Goodreads because there seemed to be no recourse against anonymous persons who launched personal attacks on authors, or wrote "reviews" that appeared to be intended to harm the author, rather than genuine reviews of the book, things may have changed.

Help in the case of plainly egregious behavior may be forthcoming from support@goodreads.com.

SFWA members can receive help from SFWA in cases of doxxing, fake reviews of books that are not yet available, obvious targeting of entire series etc.

The Authors Guild has posted sample DMCA notices along with some useful information about Open Library (which some would say is more like a pirate site than a true library.)
https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/update-open-library/

It's worth sending a TakeDown notice.

Savvy Authors is a great resource for advice and workshops.
https://savvyauthors.com/

Finally (for now), the copyrightalliance has a very helpful blog, most recently explaining :The 5 W's of Copyright Registration".
https://copyrightalliance.org/ca_post/5-ws-copyright-registration/?_zs=TqSBb&_zl=E7Cx1

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

Social Media in the Raging 20s

In her latest LOCUS post, Kameron Hurley writes about tension and anxiety in the era of instantaneous communication and miscommunication:

Into the Raging 20s We Ride

She discusses misinformation, the pitfalls of following news bites in real time, the anxiety caused by exposure to floods of "unfettered" and unfiltered content, and feelings of helplessness when overwhelmed by what appear to be irresistible, impersonal forces. The essay begins with this generalization: "I’ve found that the insidious problem for me in scrolling through social media is that it feels like action. Ironically, it also creates – in me – a profound feeling of being out of control over events in the wider world, while generating a huge amount of anxiety and worry."

We tend to think if we Like or Share a post on a vital topic, we've done something about it. We often forget to dig deeper for reliable information or to seek out something concrete we can do in the real world. Hurley recommends rekindling the joy of creation, as well as becoming more intentional and selective about the online sources we expose ourselves to. She points out, "Our always-on culture has been driven by organizations that seek to get an increasing share of a finite resource: our attention. The more attention I give their services and algorithms, the less attention I have for the things that matter to me." The "luxury of deep focus" is an important resource of which social media can deprive us; Hurley writes about the need to rediscover that focus.

I was surprised at her remark that she's trying to spend more time on books. When and why did her book-reading decrease, I wonder? I can't imagine not reading a portion of a book-length work every day (in practice, two or three, since I always have several books going at one time, each for a different reading slot in my schedule). Unlike many people, including Hurley, I don't get ensnared by Facebook for long sessions. Some days, if time runs out, I barely glance at it or don't open it at all. When I do scan my feed, I devote only twenty minutes or so to it. Since I've friended or followed so many people, the content is effectively infinite, so there's no point in trying to consume all of it. The organizations and individuals I'm really interested in, I see regularly near the top of the page. My personal infinite black holes in terms of online reading are Quora and TV Tropes, where I have to make a conscious effort not to get sucked in except during free time I've specifically allotted to recreational surfing.

Hurley's comments about the illusion of taking action remind me of some lines from C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. (Like Shakespeare, Lewis offers an apt quote for almost any situation.) With regard to steering the victim's "wandering attention" away from what he ought to be spending his time on, senior demon Screwtape advises his pupil, "You no longer need a good book, which he really likes" to distract the "patient"; "a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about." Later, Screwtape says, "The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." Screwtape would probably get a lot of mileage from the temptation to chase an endless chain of web links down multiple rabbit holes. In a different work (I can't remember which), Lewis points out that our brains weren't designed to cope with infinite demands on our sympathy in the form of a torrent of news about crises and disasters in distant places that we have no power to affect. I wonder what Lewis would say about social media and the 24-hour news cycle. His reaction would definitely not be favorable; in his lifetime, he avoided reading newspapers on the grounds that the content was often distorted or downright false.

Hurley's essay concludes with a declaration that's easy to applaud but often hard to practice: "Our attention, like our lives, is finite. Choose wisely."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic Part 4 - Fifty Year Test

How Do You Know If You've Written A Classic

Part 4

Fifty Year Test

Previous parts in "How do you know if you've written a classic?" series are:

Part 1 in this Series is about writing a "classic" illustrating the long time fan discovering new entries in a series.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 2, Spock's Katra, is a long answer to a request for material for an online blog.  My answer focused on Theodore Bikel and his roles in Star Trek.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/10/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html

Part 3 answers very insightful interview questions from a Podcast host.  The verbal podcast interview is very different, but here are answers done with some time to think of how to explain the invisible connections between Star Trek, my deep study of the fan dynamics of the TV Series, and my own original universe Sime~Gen novels.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-do-you-know-if-youve-written.html
Now in Part 4 we look at an OLD historical mainstream novel (written in the mid 1960's) - not a Romance Genre item which leaves you room to shift genres and make a truly original contribution to the field.  Study its marketing and now re-marketing as an ebook (I picked it up on Kindle, free, when advertised on BookBub).

Romance Genre needs marketing like this.  There are plenty of Historical novels as good, and even more that are just plain better, set in the 1800's, that should be promoted like this.

https://www.amazon.com/Tai-Pan-Epic-Novel-Founding-Asian-ebook/dp/B07HB94TBJ/

This novel is about the founding of Hong Kong.  In 2018, Hong Kong exploded into the news with "protests" and marches against being "ruled" by China.  China is in the news with "trade negotiations" -- and intellectual property theft (a crime that didn't exist when Hong Kong was founded).

The THEMATIC issues that a Romance writer can lift from Clavell's "Asian Saga" will seem as if they were ripped from the headlines of the 2020's.

Clavell played up the sex and violence.  If you re-set this entire "founding of" and the rise of an international mogul into the coming Space Age where nations fight for trade among the planets and asteroids with a focus on Romance, in 50 years, you might see your themes repeating in the headlines.  Clavell didn't live long enough, but did see the sure success of a classic.

I am seeing his "style" of writing emerging in the science fiction field, so blend Romance into the mix, study the style, create a new genre if you add dimensions of Soul Mates to politics and the forces that move human history.  Don't forget to include E. E. Smith's Lensman Series premise and themes. 

Yes, humanity never learns, or maybe new souls have to take the same courses of instruction in the school of hard knocks, but that stubborn, dense-headed element of humanity is what you can exploit to create a Classic Romance of the magnitude that Clavell has reached.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Worldbuilding From Reality Part 12 - Worldbuilding Focuses Plot Options

Worldbuilding From Reality

Part 12

Worldbuilding Focuses Plot Options 

Previous entries in the Worldbuilding From Reality series are indexed here:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/05/index-to-worldbuilding-from-reality.html

Part 11 is about "Worldbuilding Does Not A Story Make" -- which is true.

But Theme is the foundation of Worldbuilding -- what is the substance, nature and function of "reality" -- what does it mean, "the science fiction world," "the art world," "the financial world?"

"World" seems to have both an objective and subjective component or connotation.

Our subjective "world" is focused on our major interest of the moment, on the one thing that looms largest in our perceptions, what we understand as the generator of the parameters within which the future (or at least our own lives) will flourish.

In other words, "world" means "Happily Ever After."

World defines not only what we see, but what we don't (or refuse) to see.

So the subjective perception of "the world" around us does not make the story of our lives, but rather defines the options for actions that will generate the conflicts which, when resolved, reveal what the Story of Our Lives is really about.

One of the definitive points in the life/story/plot of a generation is the War of the Times.

We talk about World War I and World War II, which have generated many movies, many Romances.  Romance flourishes during War because life-or-death-risks are so very primal.

We talk about the Korean War, especially these days with the North Korea vs South Korea conflict in play, with North Korea still allied with (or under the thumb of) China.  We talk about Vietnam, still in living memory of adults now putting their children through college.  Vietnam War is of special interest to today's young audiences because the US politics of the time fractured under the stressful question of whether the USA should be involved at all, while at the same time we still had the Draft which attempted to force young men to go fight.

Every generation has had young men (and now women) blooded in combat, and those who have fought aver that it changed them, opened a gulf between them and those who did not get deployed into real explosive danger.

While you're up to your ass in alligators, it is hard to remember your objective was to drain the swamp.

Our objective, as writers, is to explain how, in everyday reality, a reader can act in order to achieve an actual, Happily Ever After expanse of decades of life.

Right now, in 2020, the HEA as a real life achievement seems to be an idiotic idea.

But in Science Fiction Romance, in Paranormal Romance, you can find not only hope, but a workable plan.

There still exist aspects of everyday life that respond to your personal actions and decisions.  Finding them is one thing, and then presenting those options to your readers is yet another hurdle to leap over.

Here is the principle behind using fiction to convince a reader that they have such options, and the personal ability, fortitude, heroism, and luck to be able to implement that option - make it real in everyday life.

People don't believe what they are told.

People believe what they figure out for themselves.

The harder they have to work at figuring, the more convinced they become of the ultimate truth behind their discovery.

The writing principle is SHOW DON'T TELL.

Once the reader SEES, they figure out for themselves what it means.

Here are two series of posts about how to structure a convincing argument for the Happily Ever After ending.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/11/index-to-believing-in-happily-ever-after.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/02/index-to-theme-symbolism-integration.html

SYMBOLISM is how the writer SHOWS without TELLING. Master its use.

The reader, in times like these, is looking at a world boiling over, spoiling for a fight (or an additional fight), whole massive groups of people trying to force other massive groups to change their behavior.

Historians have often determined that wars are, at their root, all about economics.

We seem to be in an epoch of human history boiling over with passionate religious convictions, one of which is that it is a religious duty to force everyone to adopt your religion, forsaking all others.

But look deeper, and you may find where that same hardwired human propensity for believing is filled up with belief in things other than deities.

Some believe in socialism with the same religious passion others believe in capitalism.  A writer searching for a theme could ask questions about whether any "...ism" is healthy to believe in.

Apparently, humans must believe something.  If that mental  component of our "world" or "world view" is empty, something noxious will crawl in to inhabit it.

Whatever is hiding in the "belief" compartment of our world view will manifest in our behavior.

Behavior, both habitual and adopted (such as living on junk food vs. going on a keto diet) behaviors are plot generators because the internal conflict kicked up between what hides in "belief" and what we, ourselves, or others around us, try to stuff into that belief compartment is a War To The Death.

"War to the Death" internally generates the external behavior that matches it,  thus driving the Plot.

To be a novel, that plot (or sequence of actions) must evolve all the way to a resolution (not the resolution, but at least a resolutions) of the internal and external conflicts.

In our everyday real world, the hatred and revenge fueled wars (large and small) are not likely to be resolved in our lifetimes.  But the internal war between what we believe and what others insist we must believe (or die) can be resolved.

Once that internal conflict is resolved, the INDIVIDUAL is at peace, regardless of the video clips bombarding them from all sides.

That state of internal peace, shared by a couple, reinforced by the coupling itself, is in fact the Happily Ever After.

Here is an article which indicates a connecting link between economics (the source of war) and behavior (the source of dramatic plots).

https://www.inc.com/melina-palmer/these-5-simple-concepts-of-behavioral-economics-can-drastically-improve-your-marketing-efforts.html

Subtitled: The human brain doesn't make decisions in the way we think it "should."

The article is about how marketers use your beliefs to trick you into behaving as they want you to, even if it is against your best interests.

Find a story that goes with such conflict and plots as hinted at in that piece and you will have a novel series.

To find the story, find the Characters who live in that "world."  Their subjective world is nestled in an objective world they can't see because of a belief jammed in under the beliefs they think they espouse.

If you can create that World-within-World structure with your worldbuilding, any story you tell will be vivid with verisimilitude.

Here are two more posts discussing how all this fits together with our modern, contemporary headlines -- ugly headlines we can rip Romance out of.

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2016/06/depiction-part-14-depicting-cultural.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2019/09/soul-mates-and-hea-real-or-fantasy-part.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com