Category: writing

November

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

November used to be my favorite month, because it was the month of my birth and because it was the time the lights went up for Christmas in the city of Porto and also because it was cold but not really cold, so the sort of enjoyable cold that makes it pleasurable to curl up by the wood stove with a cat or three. (Grandma had a big armchair by the stove, and I read in it and the cats slept on me.)

The lights were important because dad used to take me out to the city for a whole day.  We usually went and watched some sports event.  Didn’t matter which, because what mattered was I got to be daddy’s girl for the whole day.  And then we’d eat out, and then we’d walk around the city watching the workmen put up lights.  This was also when street vendors first set up for the holidays, and dad used to get me a toy, which was a big thing because I’d been trained early not to ask to be bought things.  Mind you, the toy was on the level of a macdonald’s toy, but its selection and decision on what to buy made it lots of fun.  The one I remember was a little plastic chicken that laid plastic eggs when you pressed on its back.

Then as night fell, dad would get me a rolled-newspaper-cone of chestnuts and we’d walk around seeing the lights light up.  And then we came home on the double-decker bus and unless it was really full, we sat upstairs, on the seat over the driver so I could pretend to be driving.  Sometimes dad got me chocolate coins or chocolate cigarettes but I had to be careful and not get any on my clothes, because chocolate was one of the things mom was sure I was allergic to.  (Yes, she had some excuse, but also was not very scientific in her observations.)

I wonder if dad had or has any idea how important and magical that annual day out was for me, magical enough that I still warm myself at the memory almost half a century later.

I find my kids have this sort of magical memories, sometimes from things I did just because it was convenient, like take them for high tea after school because Dan was working out of town and neither of them liked the same foods, so cooking dinner was a pain and it was easier to take them for high tea (the shop was on the way from from school) and then give them an egg or hotdog for dinner.  (Instead of cooking three separate dinners.)

Today I start NaNoWrimo to finish Through Fire and Darkship Revolution and — if it works out — to write To The Dragons in full. That way I can send it to Toni while I’m in Portugal for the holidays.  Yes, it’s insane, but one year I wrote two novels — The Musketeer’s Seamstress (might be apprentice) and Plain Jane — so it should technically be possible.

A bad start though.  I woke late because I had disturbed dreams all night of being woven into a wicker mannequin of the sort you use for dresses. I think because my asthma has made a come back in the night.  So I shall use the pump and caffeinate.

And meanwhile you might want to read Amanda Green taking down the Telegraph (it got jealous of the attention the Guardian gets from us and decided to be stupid about Amazon) on Book Plug Friday.

Speaking of Book Plugs, I hope you’re doing better than I because October was dismal.  Mind you, I have nothing new up.  But I’ve heard this complaint enough that I wonder if Amazon saw this downward trend in indie sales, too and hence created KU.  If so, they really need to make it independent of your exclusive status and somehow pay more to the authors, because I don’t think they’re getting enough people in it or enough quality.  The books I’ve got from it tend to be very mixed. At any rate, tying things up in the Kindle exclusive is a bad idea.  Bezos doesn’t need it to beat the competition; all it does is limit the offerings.

Oh, and if you read nothing else this November, go read this John C. Wright gift to his fans.  And then tip him or something, because in a just world this story would win ALL the awards.

And now I go caffeinate.  And write.

 

Of Despair, Hope, and Climbing Paths

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s not a secret to anyone that I’m of a depressive turn of mind. This does not mean I’m depressed – at least not right now – but that when faced with a stress, my mind tends to head down towards depression. When faced with a question of guilt, I tend to blame myself.

Now I hear you clucking and saying something about medicines for that. Of course there are.

But here is something our overly therapeutic age misses: guilt and fear of being terrible have a purpose.

I’m not going to link the book, because I think it would bring on us the mother of all trollings, but those of you who are on Sarah’s Diner on Facebook know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.

There is a man who wrote a book that he claims he’s been writing both since 75 and for twenty years. (We didn’t ask what year it is in his world, so it’s our fault.) He painted the cover himself, and the drawing isn’t bad for a 12 year old or so.

Anyway, he thinks the book is the best thing since sliced bread. You see, it’s not about one of them troubled teenagers. It’s about a good girl who does everything right. He thinks this puts it on a par with several greats of literature (though how he got there, since the greats of literature all write characters with flaws and the ones he mentioned surely didn’t write about good girls, is beyond me.) His book is so much better than all that trash featuring vampires and werewolves, because those are unimaginative. His is the first time that story got told. And it should be assigned to every high school student.

If you’re already seeing the several threads of delusion there, it gets worse. Though a lot of the comments made about his grammar do not in fact make any sense (and enlightened for me why so many people think that all indie books are full of grammar errors. It’s because they learned grammar on Mars or something) some are spot on. He certainly has typos. But beyond all that, his stuff is stilted and weird, impossible to follow and there’s no narrative line to attach to.

And then he put his magnum opus out. And waited for praise, accolades the Novel [sic] prize and the Oscar [?] to just roll in.

What he got instead was a whole bunch of people pointing and laughing. And he can’t understand it, because after all, his book is the most original, most uplifting, most everything EVAH. So these people must be jealous of his brilliance.

Some of the Huns had great fun baiting him in the comments, but here’s the thing: I could grin at their comments (and his behavior is horrible enough to make one want to hit him) but I also felt that little cringe one feels when one sees a bit of oneself in a crazy person.

Because I started out like that. Oh, not under the impression what I was writing was so original or that everyone who writes vampires and werewolves is “unimaginative.” I’d read way too much for that. (Which I think Mr. Original hasn’t.)

But I started out writing things that had no discernible plot, characters only I could love, and hamfisted prose. [Okay, the last one was not so much “started out” as “last week”.]

I got rejected.

And then because I don’t have a healthy self-esteem (or much self-esteem at all, really, though the audience is helping me) I bought a bunch of books on how to do it, and I started analyzing it.

So, I couldn’t just self publish them, and yeah, that’s a difference. BUT I suspect if I had self-published and no one bought, and I’d got awful comments (except given what I was writing at the time it would probably sell on kink. Aliens. No I’m not telling.) the process would have been the same.

Because my idea of myself is not diamond-hardened and fire proof, I’d have gone “Oh.” And I’d have considered the idea that maybe my stuff really did suck and I only didn’t see it because it was mine. And then I’d have got the books/followed the same road.

So, to an extent, this depressive turn of mind, and this self doubt serve a purpose. The reason I run so hard is that me is following me, and I know the b*tch. If she catches up to me with all her doubts and insecurities, I’m going down for the count.

But sometimes she does catch me. And that’s an issue too.

My books take an average of two weeks to actually write – active writing time. In between there is a needed silence of two weeks to a month. The “battery recharging/ideation” time.

So how come I average two books a year (and some years I write six?) Well that’s the silences that aren’t necessary.

This is going to sound completely crazy considering I make a living at this, but I go through entire months of being convinced everything I ever write is drek. And then I can’t write at all. Extracting words from my mind becomes sort of like passing a novel out through a narrow crack in a wall, in papers the size of fortune cookie fortunes.

I could do without those silences. I could do without the fears so bottomless that I will accept any suggestion/criticism, no matter how ridiculous. I’ve learned over the years to do nothing to past works when I’m in this mood, and certainly not to read reviews/comments. Because if I read them at that time and then go and change my work, I will kill it. At best, I make it into soup without direction as I try to be all things to all people. At worst… You don’t want to know.

Now imagine someone with this turn of mind and the years of apprenticeship required to write something halfway decent. (I think I achieved that last week!)

Don’t nobody call no ambulance (yes, the grammar is intentional. Yes, I know. Nails on chalkboard) because it’s been years since this happened – but sometimes I felt I was spiraling down, with each level of shame/guilt worse, and constant memories of every humiliating/stupid mistake I’d made, to the point where often the only thing keeping me from committing suicide was knowing I had kids, and a duty to them.

It occurs to me that most of you are more of my stamp than of Mr. Greatest Thing Ever Written and You’re All Envious Hacks. And also that even for those who aren’t writers, these are tough times.

Not only are many of us struggling to make ends meet in Summer of (no) Recovery Six, but technological change is doing to the texture of our everyday life what hormones do to a pre-teen boy just before the jump.

You know the change is needed and largely beneficial, but we’re not a teen boy, and we don’t know where it leads. Everything is changing, and we’re caught in the middle of it. Unlike our “elites” we aren’t trying to take the world back (way back. Into feudalism) to where we feel more comfortable. But we do get scared and confused and wonder if what we’re doing is really for the best, like a beginner writer caught between two ways of writing and not sure which one is best (since it’s not just what he likes.)

In both cases: be good to yourself. Do the best you can. Few things in life are permanent. If what you are trying proves wrong, try something else.

And yeah, most of us have been tightening and tightening and tightening and cutting out all entertainment. And no, it’s not by choice.

But here is a suggestion: let that belt out a little bit. Shop advisedly. Buy bang for the buck. Amazon Prime furnishes us with a never-end of free movies and tv series, for instance. They’re a little old, but hey, we don’t have cable (expensive) so they’re new to us. And I’ve just joined Kindle Unlimited Lending Library. Now I know they pay a little less to writers, unless the story is 2.99 or under but here’s the thing: with it I read more than I could otherwise. So I don’t feel too bad for my fellow writers. $2 or so is better than what I would pay them otherwise (nothing, pretty much) and it allows me to read back up to the levels I like.

We also got a zoo membership and a membership to a couple of museums. These are expensive, relatively, but they give us a chance to run away every time things get to be too much. Weirdly, my family (each working three jobs or so) hits that wall at the same time. Most weekends we’ll all be working, catching up on things, maybe stopping for a movie in the evening (though not often.) And then one Sunday, usually dark and dreary with snow on the ground, we all go “this just isn’t working. I’m not getting anything done. Let’s go to—” And at that time it’s good to think “sure” and not “Do we have the money.” (Besides, when you have four people, one entry to a museum for all of us is half a year’s entry.)

That usually keeps the worst of depression away, while you’re working and don’t see an end in sight, and aren’t sure you are any good or will ever get anywhere.

When it doesn’t…

We humans are tormented/followed by the idea that our life must have a purpose. What I mean is, even the most irreligious of humans feels that he must be here for some reason.

Last week I posted the free book by James Owen, which I really do think is a wonderful pick me up if you’re trolling the depths. A couple of hours later, I had a thank you in my email. One of you – not a commenter, but a reader here – thanked me, because he’d been spiraling down the pit of hopelessness and trying not to think of doing away with himself. The book came just at the right time, and it stopped the spiral.

And suddenly I thought “Wow. What if my entire life, everything I’ve done, everything I am, was just for that purpose? To give a man a rope as he was slipping down the slope?”

Then I remembered an Agatha Christie story (in her bio) which I now don’t remember if it was a family thing or something that was told to her (I know she used it in a short story, later on) of someone who goes out to a cliff intending to throw himself down. Only there’s a woman there, sitting and looking out at the sea. And he can’t kill himself in front of someone. So he doesn’t. He goes back to life and it gets better.

I don’t remember how she explained it, but the thing is that the woman was also there, contemplating ending it all, and then (she somehow finds out what happened) she realizes if she’d killed herself before he arrived, he’d have been lost.

What I’m trying to say is even if your purpose in life is to just sit there at the right time and the right place (or if you don’t believe in purpose, your usefulness) there is something only you can do. It might be what you intend to do or it might be an entire accident (Instapundit, asked how he became instapundit “Like most things in my life, it happened by accident.”) But just by being here, you can become a lifesaver, and the life you save might change the world for the better.

In the same way, just by trying the best you can – at writing or life or whatever – you can sometimes become extraordinary. Perhaps most times. Yes, there is survivor bias in stories of “I tried, and I succeeded” but perhaps the arrow goes the other way. Perhaps if you really try, and are willing to admit you’re not perfect and to see clearly, you mostly succeed.

It’s just most people don’t. Because either absolute self confidence or its lack (yes, even that) are in a way far more comfortable.

But if you neither leap into the abyss, nor stand there frozen at its edge, telling yourself there is no abyss, if you learn the paths down and up the cliff, and if you lend a hand to those on the same road… perhaps, just perhaps that black cliff can become an enchanted cove where many find solace and life.

It’s worth a try.

Meet the Character

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*The lovely and talented Jagi Lamplighter tagged me for a “meet the character” blog tour.  Her own can be found here.

So you can either blame her or thank her for what follows:*

Meet His Grace, Seraphim Ainsling, the Duke of Darkwater, main character of Witchfinder.

The duke comes into his study wearily. He’s not at all sure about this strange person who wants to interview him, after all. It’s all very well to say she is the author, but the Duke of Darkwater is a proper Christian, raised as such, and really, he doesn’t believe in this whole thing about the Author being a woman sitting in another parallel world.

It’s not that Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater disbelieves in other worlds. He’s a magic user, after all. What’s more, since his father’s shameful and still unexplained suicide, he’s been reading his father’s diaries.

He has discovered that his father was the King’s Witchfinder, which means the man in charge of a service that traveled to other worlds where magic was forbidden to rescue magic practitioners or, often, shape shifters, most of them children, most of them condemned to death.

And Seraphim, with the help of his half-brother, Gabriel Penn, has been doing the same work.

So he knows without being told that the woman slouching on one of his straight-backed chairs, wearing really quite indecent breeches and a far too molding shirt is from the world he and Gabriel nicknamed The Madhouse. It’s a barbarous place without magic, which, in its place has developed a lot of machinery, most of it bewildering.

The Duke comes in and bows, very correctly, and the wretched woman has the decency to stand, if not to curtsey. On the other hand, he wouldn’t like to see her attempt a curtsey. She looks rather… unbalanced, as is.

“Ah,” he says. “Lady Sarah Hoyt?”

She pushes her spectacles up her nose and tries to frown at him, but really looks like a cat about to cough up a hairball. “Not lady. Mrs. I’m an American. We don’t have titles of nobility, and I rather like it that way.”

He has time to do no more than say “Ah!” in a tone he hopes is interpreted as “Who let you in my study without knowing the most rudimentary mode of interaction between human beings,” before she explains, “Of course, I understand it’s different in your world, Avalon, where the land is bound to people by magic, and magic makes everything different. It’s strange, you know, because on Earth we tend to think of magic as an easy way to get things. But magic is really duty in your case, isn’t it.”

He inclines his head. Duty about covers everything he does, from trying to restore his house’s financial fortunes which his father quite squandered in wine and women and more wine and more women and occasionally even women and wine. There are the younger children – Caroline and Michael – to provide for. And something must be done about Gabriel, who had to leave the university over that unfortunate scandal involving the necromancer.

“So,” Mrs.-not-lady Hoyt says, smiling dementedly at him and waving around a notebook and something that looks like a stylus. “So, what would you say is your personal goal?”

“To try to bring my family through financial ruin and the implications of my father’s dangerous doings unscathed,” he says.

“But what about your illegal rescue missions? Didn’t the king forbid travel to other worlds? And don’t you and your half-brother do just that? What if they discover you?”

“Oh, you know about that?” He sighed. “If they discover us, attainder and perhaps death follow. At least imprisonment.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because we aren’t put in the world – any world – Mrs. Hoyt, to please ourselves and ignore our duty to other human beings.”

“Isn’t that a problem, though, approaching life as nothing but duty?”

The Duke’s green eyes look world-weary, suddenly, “The only thing—”

“Yes?”

“The only thing I resent is having to marry Honoria Blythe. But if I understand my father’s notes correctly that was his plan to restore our fortunes. And Blythe’s Blessings is a huge magic house. If only I were sure it wasn’t tied in to the Others.”

“The Others?”

“People who seem to be … ah… involved in shady financial and magical dealings in low magic worlds. We… they’ve attempted against Gabriel and I more than once, including setting traps.”

“I see.”

“Well, Mrs. Hoyt, I’m glad you do because I don’t.” He rustles some papers on his desk, “If you excuse me, Madam, I am extremely busy.” If only he were sure that Gabriel’s half-elf origins weren’t part of the problem.

He looks up to see if the intruder has left, but his office is quite empty and suddenly he isn’t sure why he thought he was talking to the Author. At any rate, surely if his lifestory were a book, surely it would be written by someone with more aplomb than a middle aged woman with neither style nor manners.

He stands up to ring his bell and summon Gabriel to his study for a discussion.

But pinned to the bellpull is a card. It says Witchfinder – in which Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater discovers there is more to life than duty, and that his family can often rescue itself.

He frowns at the card, then drops it, fluttering, to the floor, and rings the bell.

WHOM TO TAG:

Being myself, which is a bit of a liability, I got busy writing and herding cats or in this case family members, and forgot to give people I wanted to tag a heads up.

Given all that, I got lucky three had responded by tonight.  If others respond tomorrow, I’ll add them here as the day goes on.

The three that answered are:

Amanda Green –

I’m older than 20 and younger than death and that’s all you’ll get from me about my age. After all, it’s not polite to ask a woman how old she is. I’m a mother, a daughter and was a wife. I’ve spent most of my life in the South and love to travel. The only problem with that is my dog always thinks I’ve abandoned him when I do and it takes weeks to reassure the poor thing and my cat resents the fact I came back before he could figure out a way to kill the dog and hide the body. My house is haunted – it is, really. I swear it. What else explains the table that plays music and the light that comes on by itself? – but it’s mine and I love it. Okay, I’m a little strange. But that makes life interesting.

When it comes to writing, I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember. It’s something I can’t not do. Nor, it seems, can I stick with one genre. I have books out that are urban fantasy, romantic suspense, paranormal romance and military science fiction. I will soon be releasing in episodic form an historical fantasy set at the turn of the 20th Century. There never seems to be a dearth of ideas, only a severe lack of time to write them all.

Amanda blogs at Nocturnal Lives.

Dave Freer:

Dave Freer lives on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, off Australia, being about as far into the remote backwoods as he could put himself or be put (let’s not ask which). There he lives a sort of chaotic experiment in self-sufficiency, involving a lot time at sea in small boats, doing remarkably silly things with spears and nets in water cold enough to freeze an impure though solid. His real talent is the fine art of making one vegetable grow, sort-of, where fifty plants flourished before. He’s the author of a slew of books (19?), a few of which blundered onto bestseller lists, until thrown out by respectable literature. He’s a disgrace, really. You can read of his misadventures at Flinders Freers.

Doug Dandrige:

Doug Dandridge was born in Venice Florida in 1957, the son of a Florida native and a Mother of French Canadian descent. An avid reader from an early age, Doug has read most of the classic novels and shorts of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as multiple hundreds of historical works. Doug has military experience including Marine Corps JROTC, Active Duty Army, and the Florida National Guard. He attended Florida State University, studying Biology, Geology, Physics, and Chemistry, and receiving a BS in Psychology. Doug then studied Clinical Psychology at the University of Alabama, with specific interests in Neuropsychology and Child Psychology, completing a Masters and all course work required for a PhD. He has worked in Psychiatric Hospitals, Mental Health Centers, a Prison, a Juvenile Residential Facility, and for the past five years for the Florida Department of Children and Families. Doug has been writing on and off for fifteen years. He concentrates on intelligent science fiction and fantasy in which there is always hope, no matter how hard the situation. No area of the fantastic is outside his scope, as he has completed works in near and far future Science Fiction, Urban and High Fantasy, Horror, and Alternate History.

You can find him here.

UPDATE: Jody Lynn Nye has also answered in the affirmative:

Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as ‘spoiling cats.’ When not engaged upon this worthy occupation, she writes fantasy and science fiction books and short stories.  You can find her here.

The promo post! Good for What Hails You!

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Happy Saturday, Huns & Hoydens! We’ve a good load of books again this week, including an entry from the elder scion of the House of Hoyt! Go, read, review, enjoy; that is all. Well, except to note that future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Horde Herder, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Keeper of Useless Secrets

Robert A. Hoyt

Cat’s Paw

King of Cats Book 1

Many humans know there is a mountain at the end of the universe to which a bird flies every thousand years to sharpen its beak, until the end of the mountain comes, and thus the end of eternity. What few of them know is that of the mountain only a few small grains of sand remain. And the bird that is to end eternity is alive and ready to fly. At half past noon at the end of the universe, the last great hopes of everything that exists, ever existed or has yet to exist, rests with a stray cat with alcohol issues, a Siamese cat with gender issues, and a Persian cat with pregnancy issues. Things are just about to get fun.

Alma Boykin

Cities and Throngs and Powers

Honor or freedom or yes?

The Salazar family lost everything in the Collapse of 2015 except their pride. Two years later, Mr. Salazar pays a debt with his youngest daughter, Alicia. She must work at Illif House, the mysterious mansion on the plains near the Flatirons. Alicia discovers more than she could have guessed, including a chance at independence. When blood ties threaten to drag her back into the world she’d hoped to leave forever, Alicia must choose between her family’s honor and her heart’s desire.

Laura Montgomery

The Sky Suspended

A generation has passed since asteroid scares led the United States to launch its first and only interstellar starship. The ship returns and announces the discovery of another Earth. People are star-struck, crowds form in Washington, DC, and a boy from Alaska and two lawyers grapple with questions surrounding whether ordinary people will emigrate to the stars. Calvin Tondini is one of those lawyers, and he works his way to the heart of that question.

This is human wave science fiction.

Michael Kingswood

Glimmer Vale

Glimmer Vale Chronicles Book 1

Free this weekend!

Lydelton, a small fishing town in a remote valley called Glimmer Vale, is the perfect place for two fighting men on the run to stop and decide on a plan. But when Julian and Raedrick arrive they find the town besieged by a ruthless band of brigands. Worse, the brigands have taken up station in the mountain passes, blocking the two friends’ escape. With no way around the brigands and no option of returning the way they came, Julian and Raedrick accept an offer of employment. Their mission: defeat the brigands and restore peace to Glimmer Vale.

They are outnumbered at least twenty to one, long odds even if they recruit help. But that help may not be enough when the specter of their past rears its head, forcing Julian and Raedrick to openly face what they are fleeing or risk losing not just their freedom but the lives and fortunes of Lydelton’s inhabitants.

Glimmer Vale is a short, fun fantasy adventure novel, the first installment in the Glimmer Vale Chronicles.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

Tollard’s Peak

Glimmer Vale Chronicles Book 3

Winter in Glimmer Vale – a time to remain close to shelter or, preferably, indoors. Most definitely not a time to brave the mountain peaks surrounding the valley. Raedrick and Julian certainly have no intention of doing so until a man from their past, nearly dead from exposure, appears at the outskirts of Lydelton. Once recovered, he tells them of his friend who lies injured on the flank of Tollard’s Peak, the tallest mountain in the region. Unable to ignore the stranded fellow’s need, the two Constables form a party to rescue him.

But there is more to the story than it first appeared, and very soon Raedrick and Julian find themselves struggling against far more than the elements as they brave the perilous peak. It will take all of their strength and resolve to survive their quest and get to the bottom of the mystery that drew these men into the bleak cold of the mountainside. And they are not the only ones who are searching.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

C.J. Carella

Bad Vibes

Occult consultant Dante Godoy arrives to the small town of Redemption, Nevada, just in time to help Sheriff Matilda Knobb deal with two impossible murders. Together they will confront unspeakable evils in the night.

“Bad Vibes” is a 7,900-word short story introducing a horror setting that will be explored in future novels by C.J. Carella

Steven G. Johnson

Keep of Glass

Girls can’t be knights. Not in the real world. But lately, with all the strange things happening, the real world’s gotten a lot less predictable. So why can’t Galehodin fight for the King like her brother? Well, besides the strangers trying to kill her, there’s always the angry immortal who wants her soul… literally.

Michael A. Hooten

The Curses of Arianrhod

A Bard Without a Star Book 4

There is no magic strong enough to break a mother’s curse.

On the day Gwydion ap Don discovered he had a son, the boy’s mother Arianrhod cursed him to never have a name unless she gave him one herself. Now he wanders Bangreen, exiled from his home, and trying everything he can think of to break the curse.

Left with no other option, he takes the boy to Caer Sidi, where Arianrhod lives in her own exile. But even when confronted, she refuses to name the boy, or even acknowledge him. She wants to punish Gwydion for the rest of his life, despite the fact that he still loves her.

Gwydion almost loses hope, but a tiny sparrow leads him to the wise Ousel of Penwyth, who tells him not to break the curse, but fulfill it. So Gwydion and his son return to Caer Sidi, disguised as shoemakers, to trick Arianrhod into giving the boy a name. She calls him “the fair one with the sure hand”—Llews Llaw Gyffes—and the curse ends. But in her fury at being tricked she curses him again, this time that he will never bear arms until she gives them to him herself. Gwydion swears that he will trick her again, but can he come up with a plan that both fulfills the new curse and keeps his son safe from his mother’s wrath at the same time?

The Future — it is Open

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

There is no sword about to fall on your shoulders.  The world isn’t coming to an end.

To those of you rapidly paging down to yesterday’s blog, no there is no contradiction.  The people – at least for now – in charge of our destiny as a people are performing acts of astonishing malpractice.  Things can get very, very sticky.  As sticky as a wad of chewed up gum that got covered in stickfast.

So?

So, what am I talking about now?  Do I really expect you to think there is no problem?

No, of course I don’t.  Look, you silly critter, when did anyone ever promise you a problem free time to live in?  Not only was that always highly unlikely – you have read some history, right? – but you’d probably end up finding it boring if it came about.

We are in an exceedingly tight spot and our foreign policy of speaking softly and carrying an apologetic stick is going to get us in wars.  On the other hand we are and have always been the most innovative civilization in the history of mankind and we have some awesome fighting machines.  (And those are just our guys.  You should see the mechanical ones.)

What I’m trying to say here is that there is no predetermined outcome.  Decay and loss of power and civilizational strength is a choice, not an inevitable destiny.

The big difference between 1984 and Friday is that no one dropped a Heinlein character in the middle of 1984.  The big difference between The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Brave New World is not much greater.

In other words, you’ve been sold a bill of goods by the cultural elite that kept all the entertainment and information industry locked tighter than a drum until very recently.  Not that they wanted to consign you to depression and despair, mind.  No, they had a bright dream of their own (some of them still do) which went something like this: capitalist society is doomed, therefore it collapses, and beyond it arises the great day of equality and perfect communism, where we shall all be like onto gods and—

The problem is that capitalism proves remarkably hard to kill, and then when you manage to kill it, SOMEHOW the bright day of perfect equality never dawns, possibly because a society that makes humans into things can’t function because humans aren’t things.  But I digress.

So the poor dears have to try harder to show you how bad capitalism is, and then when communism doesn’t work, well, frankly they’re just fed up with humanity, so they show you how that doesn’t work either, so that in the end what passes for all literature and entertainment and art becomes the loooooooooooong sustained whine of a two year old who’s just found out he can’t have a pony and (appropriately) a little red wagon “But I waaaaaaaant perfect communism!  You promised you’d give me perfect communism!”  followed by “I only can’t have perfect communism because capitalism is a poopy face, humans are poopy faces, reality is poopy face.”

Or, if you prefer the “high end” of that kind of expression, as translated to science fiction, the future is rusty and closed to the possibility of new invention and technology and nothing works, and it feels like the 1930s redux, and then they all die.

These are the people who say space travel isn’t really sf, and no one would have adventures in space, but of course, if you read them these are people who grew up in comfort unimaginable to kings and princes of even a few years back, and who think you can’t have fun anywhere, and that, frankly, we should all listen to them when they say incredibly stupid moralizing things like “you can’t go to space until you learn to take care of the Earth.”  (Why?  The Earth might very well turn out to be the least of our worlds.  Our cradle, sure.  But anyone who knows how reality works, knows if we had had to stay in Europe till we learned to take care of it, we’d never have expanded to the New World.  Because part of learning is to experience new things.)  This is sort of like SF written by the devotees of a scatological cult.

Wait, it is SF written by devotees of a scatological cult.  They believe the Earth is overpopulated, human invention has finished its run and we’ll never get further technologically, and besides, no system of society works.  (What they mean is that no system works perfectly, which is how they demand that all systems but socialism work, and of course socialism doesn’t work at all.)

They got hold of the publishing houses late seventies which is when most people say they stopped reading SF – though they don’t tell you why, because most of them don’t know.  They just know that there was nothing on the shelves for them.

Well, I’m telling you why: because at that point the supposed writer-entertainers started selling gloom and doom as our only future, the same gloom and doom people were getting from their schools (we were all going to freeze to death) their newspaper (coming ice age because of the sins of industrialized society) and even their scientific publications (coming ice age for sure, the only good thing was that it would probably exterminate humanity.)

I think I was twenty nine when I realized that all these prophecies of doom weren’t true.  I remember the big sigh of relief when I realized the Earth probably wasn’t overpopulated (Statistics suck, overpopulated is not what you think it is, when tech allows us to survive on the produce of smaller and smaller areas and at any rate, the world, MOSTLY is full of empty space) and that even if it were, that was just a spur to invention and with more people we had more minds to invent things.  I’d assumed till then I was living in twilight years (and sparkly vampires hadn’t even been invented yet.)

Yesterday a lot of people in the comments said they hoped the feeling of doom would pass, just like it passed before.  I agree.  I mean, I remember the Carter years, and the people preparing to go back to the Earth.  There’s always something a little silly about that, anyway, because when a crisis like that hits, it hits in ways you don’t expect.

At any rate, a lot of us are having 70s flashbacks, and in my case they are worse than most.  (I appreciate that a lot of Russian immigrants agree with me, but to them I want to say “you have it easy.  You didn’t see the fall and if you had it wouldn’t be in a modern society.  In my case… PTSD might better describe what’s happening.”)  But they’re also reassuring in a way, because we didn’t end up in the soup then and maybe we’ll escape now.

Don’t yell at me.  I’m aware – very aware – we are all of us in much worse shape than in the seventies, for several reasons, among them a slow bleed away of competency due to our execrable school system.  But – this is important – while our kids are uneducated it doesn’t mean they’re stupid, and nothing wakes you like a bucket of unemployment in the face.

Also, the feeling I have about the American economy is that of a barely restrained horse, wanting to be racing.  Many things could loosen it and two of the simplest would be the end of regulatory insecurity and permitting us to exploit our vast mineral wealth, to wit oil.

Never happen?  Don’t bet on it.  Now the things after that, including a simplification and defanging of the tax code… that I can’t promise you.  But I think we have a fair shot at the first two.

And if we don’t?  If it all goes pear shaped?

Well… Portugal – and other countries – have lived through bankruptcy.  There was civilized life of a sort still going on in Lebanon in the middle of the civil war.  Things just become very weird, and ways of doing things become odd, and supplies can become irregular (which is why it’s a good idea to have some stop gaps laid by.)  Yeah, you might have to be more careful when going out.  Yeah, you might have to fence your yard.  No, you won’t like it.  But in the end all of that are minor adjustments.  Yes, even the bars on the windows and tall walls around the houses are minor adjustments.  You aren’t catapulted suddenly back to the 10th century with no reprieve.

Remember the difference between a dystopia and a dystopia with a Heinlein character in it.  Be a Heinlein character.

In other words, to paraphrase the man, if faced with the choice between being a live lamb or a dead lion, be a live lion.  As he noted, it’s often easier.

Don’t give up.  Don’t accept decay as an inevitable fate.  Fight.  Improve.  Think up new ways to do things, and new ways to get around problems.

We’ll do.  We’re humans and humans survive.

(Human Wave.)

Off The Deep End

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Jump.

Come on in, the water is fine.  Come in off the deep end.  What are you doing standing around there, looking on at the swimmers and wondering what it would feel like?  Dipping a toe in the water, thinking it’s too cold?  Going for a walk around the lake, then coming back again?

Why do you stand there envying the swimmers?  Why not jump in?

Yes, going in off the deep end feels like going insane, like losing control.  But it’s not, you know?  It’s more like gaining control.  More like being yourself.  Who else would you be?  Why would you want to be anyone else?

Speaking of going insane, you say – which is rude, since you’re on my blog. –  Well, I go, you know I’m not.  And you know it’s not that difficult to figure out what I’m talking about, don’t you?

I don’t believe that most people live lives of quiet desperation.  I do believe most people get what they’re working towards, sooner or later.

I just believe most people spend a lot of their lives anesthezising themselves so they don’t go for what they want.  It’s just one more hour in front of a reality show.  A moment of sitting here, sipping at a beer and then you can go to bed.  And then tomorrow there’s work to do.  And work is also an anesthesia.  Oh, it must be done, no doubt about it – people don’t owe you a living.  But if that’s all you do and then you come home and you say you don’t have the mind space for anything else, and you envy the people doing what they want to do – you’re lying to yourself.  Oh, yeah, you’re busy and tried and human – but if you really wanted it, you’d find a way to jump in: to go in off the deep end.

Is this about writing?  Sometimes.  I mean, by virtue of being me, that’s what I have experience with.  It’s also a lot of the people I know.  They talk about writing.  They talk a good game.  Next week, they’re going to finish their novel.  Next year they’re going to write that non-fiction book.  Next never, they’re going to finish those essays.

But I’m not completely stupid, nor do I live in a world of clones.  No, I don’t think everyone alive can, should or wants to be a writer.  But I’ve lived a long time and I’ve found that almost everyone wants to be something.  Sometimes they’re so afraid of that dream that they don’t admit it: even to themselves.

Sometimes it’s something artistic, but I don’t even know if that’s real, or if it exists because our culture expects most impossible dreams to be artistic in nature.  Maybe they are athletic.  Okay, you’ll never go into the Olympics, but does that mean you can’t run marathons?  Or maybe they’re something else entirely.  I’ve met people who REALLY wanted to be married.  I’ve met people who REALLY wanted to be moms.  I once met someone whose dream it was to become a secretary.  I know people who dream of working with wood, or cars, or…

JUMP.  Figure out a path to get where you want to go.  There usually is a way, even when it looks impossible.

Sixteen years ago some part of me had decided my dream of being a writer was impossible.  I didn’t know anyone in the field; most of the time I couldn’t send stuff out because we lacked money for postage; we didn’t have money to go to cons; I had two small children; I was an ESL speaker.

I didn’t admit to myself I’d given up, but one short story a year isn’t really trying.  And then I got sick with pneumonia, and I realized I couldn’t die – COULDN’T – with all the worlds unwritten within me.  And I came out of it ready to fight.

Of course, perhaps you’re afraid to find out that what you think is your dream, really isn’t.  This happens.  In our twenties Dan and I briefly joined an investors-and-get-rich-club.  These were people more or less in our circumstances who were buying houses, fixing them up, selling them, finding businesses to invest in, fixing them, selling their share.  I’m sure our friends who introduced us to it could now buy and sell us several times over, but here’s the issue: while we’d like to be rich, (who wouldn’t?) we found the whole PROCESS – scouting properties, buying, selling, scouting other properties, finding financing, etc – DREARY.  We never even started doing it, because the obstacles in the way were many (we didn’t know how to secure financing) and because we found the process BORING.

We decided we’d either never be rich or it would have to be made another way.  Part of this was that it wasn’t really our dream.  While we’d like to be comfortably well off – where we don’t have to worry about where the kids’ tuition is coming from (to dream, the impossible dream,) – and wouldn’t turn our nose up at a few million, the truth is we’d probably balk at the idea of having so much money that managing it is ALL we do and our whole concentration in life.  And this is where that group was headed.

You might find that.  You might jump in and decide you really didn’t want to swim in salt water, and your pond is over there.  Don’t be afraid of it.  It’s one more step towards becoming yourself.

Of course any dream worth having is not going to be easy to get to from wherever you are.  If it were, you’d already be doing it.  And of course there’s the possibility you’ll still want it, but will fail.  I’m not going to say it’s better to have loved and lost.  I’m going to say that other cliche: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.  A different angle of attack might also help.  Remember NO ONE ever made it big in something without failing at other iterations… and sometimes failing hard.  What are you afraid of?  You can always try again.  While there’s life, there’s hope.

If you’ve read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, remember what Manny said about Prof?  How he made it in Luna?  He got the job he could get, washing dishes, then moved on to babysitting, then opened his own creche, then moved on to opening a school, then to tutoring.  He made a lot of money, but also he was aiming towards a field, an area he wanted to work in.  He was, after all, a professor.

Now, would you say “I want to be a University professor.  I’ll start by washing a lot of dishes?”  No?  Why not?

Paths aren’t always easy or clear.  And sometimes you might not even be sure what you’re aiming for: you just want out of the situation you’re in.  A little more money would help you explore what you want to do…  So find a way to make a little more money.

I’m not going to say there’s dignity in every job.  There is, but some jobs purely suck.  I almost died of boredom working in retail.  But I survived.  And I moved on…

There’s this game I play with myself.  Let’s suppose somewhere thirty or forty years from now I’m on my death bed and I get a chance to send my mind/will back to myself now, to merge with my own.  I died unfulfilled, forgotten.  There was something I wanted me to do – fulfill that dream I never did in that life.

It’s my second chance.  It’s my only chance.  I was sent to this time and this place because from here I can reach my dream.  It won’t be easy.  It won’t be fast.  The path might not really be clear, but there’s a path, or I wouldn’t have been sent here and now.

So – how do I get to that dream of being a bestseller?  Well, if I start the short stories indie, maybe some people will discover me that way.  And I suck at publicity, but I can do blogs…  And then maybe…

Jump.  What are you waiting for?  Chart a course to your dream and change what doesn’t work, and keep moving.

Jump!  Go in off the deep end.

Studying War

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

The Twentieth Century was a profoundly weird century.  No.  Seriously.

I was thinking about this as I was exercising.  Currently my exercise video (have to, or I get bored and wander off) is Amazon streaming video, mystery series Foyle’s War mysteries set during WWII.

It’s funny because I never considered WWII history.  History was stuff in the eighteenth century.  WWII was part of my parents’ childhood memories.  (Yes, Portugal was neutral.  But they took in refugees and supplied food to both sides – you would too if you had a much bigger Axis country next door ready to whomp you if you sided with the allies, and, otoh, you were Britain’s oldest alliance and therefore couldn’t turn your back on them.  At any rate, considering what Portugal contributed to the effort in WWI [barefoot, unarmed soldiers.  I was reading a book about WWI and when they described the Germans attacking and the Portuguese stealing the messengers bicycles and pedaling away, I almost lost it.  It was one of those laughing through tears moments.  I grew up with stories of those poor boys sent to die at the pleasure of a government who wanted to look good and be part of the allied force, even though the country was bankrupt.  Some of them returned.  I don’t know if they returned because they stole bicycles and pedaled home and I wouldn’t hold it against them if they had.] ) Portugal had food rationing and whenever our rulers at the time thought they might have upset the axis, people went about taping the windows, in case of raids.

This as well as the regimes blinkered ideas of economics – were they Fascist?  Well… not exactly.  To a certain extent, they ruled as FDR would have unimpaired by the constitution.  But let’s face it that was as close as no separation to national socialism. It was still socialism, crossed with crony capitalism.  Cradle to grave plus your buddies got all the plum financing for public works, etc.  In their defense, they did better than the previous anarchist sympathizers.  In their non-defense, crony capitalism and economic dirigism will only take you so far. – Meant that my parents, one of whom at least was solidly middle class and probably for the time upper middle class (the extended family, at least, was) grew up knowing hunger and also such contrivances as gleaning and walking the rail line for fallen coal pieces, to keep body and soul together.

What I mean is that this was not, truly, in the end, exactly history, but stuff mom and dad had lived through and talked about, plus stuff that movies were made of.  I despaired ever writing a romance because I didn’t know nearly enough about WWII, and that’s when all romances were set.

And the Napoleonic invasions?  Well, grandma had heard of them from her grandma, so it wasn’t exactly history either.

Anyway, now that we’re nearing the anniversary of WWI, I find myself looking back at the twentieth century and thinking it was a very odd time and it has colored the way we think of things like… What causes war and what constitutes acceptable war and what our motives should be in going to war…  In a way it is probably responsible for the “Hate our side first” crowd.

I think the problem was mass media.  Well, not the problem exactly, but what made the twentieth century such a bizarre time.  If that was the case, it is entirely possible that the new media will take us back, instead, to a time where war and conflict and all are seen as what they were to begin with: a striving of tribes in defense or securing of their self interest.

I’m not making much sense, am I?  Blame it on one cup of tea and one diet coke.  Not nearly enough caffeine.

Look, humanity has always more or less been at war.  Yes, I know fantasy books, and some of the history books that resemble fantasy talk about times of peace.  But mostly peace was either localized or known only in the default.  Every religion prayed for peace because what there was, in fact, was war.

I’m not going to moralize about this.  The people who went on about how humans were particularly bad because of this, never apparently really looked at other species, from the starling to the chimp.  We strive because we’re alive, and sometimes that which we strive against is, perforce, our own species.  In a way, it is perhaps part of how we’ve tamed ourselves, because the only way to ultimately stop a really bad behavior of a group is to stop the group.

The oldest burials of our kind are chiefs with their war maces, which were sometimes ornamental (the kings were sometimes children, too) but were indisputably, a sign of power because the mace serves to hit enemies on the head, and if you can hit enough people on the head, there, you have power.  Even what appears to be peaceful agrarian villages were regularly raided by hunter-gatherers, when times got lean.  As for Celts, for all their admirable poetry and other achievements, let’s face it, they were glorified cattle robbers and headhunters.

It’s not a choice whether you’re descended from thieves, raiders and cannibals, only WHICH thieves, raiders and cannibals you are descended from and how successful they were.

Of course, these things changed.  Wars continued, but as we got wealthier as a species, as we changed more areas to be good for our habitation, there started to be pockets of peace.  Even in the middle ages, these pockets might be temporary, as Summer was war time, but there was a chance the army would take another route and your village would be left unraided.  Some lucky places could go generations without being raided.  (Okay, they were normally dirt-poor places, but all the same.)

Grow up in a place where humans have lived long enough and it’s not unusual for a farmer to turn over a box – or a jug, or even an amphora – with his plow and discover within a few coins or a couple of pieces of jewelry.  People had the thing down to a science: hear an army is approaching, bury your treasures where no one will know.  Of course, get killed and no one ever knows and it’s left for centuries or millennia, scars and mute witness to past conflicts.

With the industrial age and the professionalization of armies, we got yet another distancing of the conflict.  Places might be at war more or less continuously, but unless the army came to your region, the war was something you heard about or read about in the newspapers.

And the myth of peace spread.  The idea that peace was the normal condition of mankind.  It also spread a type of mentality in which war and making war was unconditionally bad, and therefore had to be justified with high moral words.

I’m not saying there was never demonization of the other side before.  Of course there was.  The number of Portuguese Proverbs that say something bad about Spaniards is roughly equal to the number of Portuguese Proverbs that mention Spaniards.  But beneath it, everyone pretty much knew it was your tribe fighting with the other tribe who wanted to take your land or stuff, or you wanted to take theirs.  You didn’t need to think – and didn’t think – the other tribe was terrible ideologically and would destroy the world if they won.  You just knew they would take yours stuff.

World War One was the first war in which the enemy was made a threat to the world, not just to the countries it wishes to invade.  Raped Belgian nuns and all, the war was in the end just a continuation of European nation-state wars, and yet it was blown up to a world conflict.  And from it came World War Two.

To be honest, at the same time, we’d got some strange brain worms, like communism, which was a world threat because it was “universal” in nature.  Not that communism was anything new.  In its scope it was exactly like the invading/expanding Islam of the seventh century: a militant faith, with universal aspirations, which believed conversion at sword point was valid.  But because communism (in a way the opposite of Islam which dressed its political/economic system in ideas of religion and morality) was a religious faith pretending to be an economic and political system, it penetrated in insidious ways, and claimed its prescriptions for how to live were “scientific.”

Which meant they had to be fought as a threatening would-be world-devouring ideology, because they WOULD be that, if they could.  And that muddied things further.

What I mean is that we’ve got to the point of thinking the only thing worth fighting for is ideas.  And then we have people in our own government who think the only moral war is that in which we have no interest whatsoever.  Which is sort of putting things upside down, because if we have nothing to gain or lose, than our behavior is not bound by any rational goals.  How do you “win” when you have nothing to win from this war.  When you establish democracy?  How do you measure democracy?  And how does it affect you?  Does anyone care if we’re creating worse messes for ourselves by arbitrarily quitting wars?

It also creates some very weird ideas of what war IS.  Those who believe that the US are war mongers, for instance, think we could stop wars by simply stopping.  They seem to think that the rest of the world are angels, with full fledged wings.  Terry Pratchett himself – genuflect – got the really odd idea that if a very wealthy place is unprotected, then no one will attack it.  This is somewhat more than insane, because just because we’ve been brain washed into believing only in “War for higher purpose” it doesn’t mean everyone has been and as the world turns into a time to pay the piper for years and wealth squandered trying to create paradise on Earth, any rich country will be a big fat target.

Yes, Ronald Reagan outspent the Soviets and let Capitalism defeat them.  But he didn’t do so by laying down weapons.  On the contrary.

The whole way the historians paint the two world wars as having come from German militarism is putting the cart before the horse.  Germany didn’t get all militaristic and then automagically the war started.  The war started because the expanding German industry and population needed resources and access to a warm sea port.  The militarism, pretty uniforms and arming up was simply a reaction to that.

When we pin our ideas of what war is and one gets to war on the externalization, the “feeling” of it, and the idea that all we need to do to stop war from affecting us is be really peaceful, we are making ourselves what is known in the bad neighborhoods (and the world is always a bad neighborhood) as an easy target.

The Bible can talk of studying war no more, but that’s after a miracle occurs and we’re no longer humans as we know them.  For now, being humans as we are, the best we can hope is that war doesn’t hit our particular neck of the woods.  And that means, particularly if we’re a wealthy land, going well armed and talking tough enough that the bad actors fear us.

Winning hearts and minds is all very well – but that usually – for humans – happens after the body carrying the mind and heart around has been pounded into the ground.  It’s who we are.  We’re a striving species, every man against his brother.  It’s what kept us alive.

Forget that and we’re gone.  The future belongs to those willing to fight for it.

Pygmalion my Frankenstein, Pleaded The Writer

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

One of the commenters asked about making characters come to life, how to make them more than helpful constructions who hit your plot points.

Objectively I should be the last person in the world to explain how to do that, because, well, for the first … eight novels I wrote, I didn’t know there was any other way to start than with “the character is here and wants me to tell his story.”  Characters came, and still come, to me fully formed.  I don’t sit around thinking “what are his strengths and weaknesses?  Why does he do that weird thing with his napkin?

No, I don’t know every detail about the character when he first shows up.  Usually to be honest all I know about the character is that he or she is in pain and motivated to do something to end the pain.  Sometimes the pain is emotional, sometimes physical.  And sometimes the pain might not be obvious on first meeting them.  And some characters, their pain might even evade the reader altogether – say Dyce Dare in the refinishing mysteries – but what seems to first attract me to the character is their pain.  I’ll see in which way they’re broken.

Of course, when I was young and stupid, I didn’t know the difference between pain that leads a character to move and fight and pain that results in the character just wanting to die, and not in a blaze of glory.  This resulted in two painful novels where the character just moaned about how unfortunate he was.

(I didn’t know at the time that if I’d just used slightly higher vocabulary and not made it heroic fantasy I could SO totally have got all sorts of literary prizes.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  It would have corrupted me and I’d never have learned to write properly.)

Anyway, those were the eight first novels, a couple now published, but mostly written only when the character imposed on my psyche with enough force to make me write.  I mean, it’s not like someone was paying me for it.

And then I sold a book on proposal.  I won’t say that no characters ever came to life in the Shakespeare trilogy.  Quicksilver eventually acquired a life of his/her own, and the others too eventually came lurching to reluctant life.

BUT not to start with.  To start with they were concepts on the page.  I needed Shakespeare.  I needed a gender changing elf who is both the fair youth and the dark lady.  I needed a wicked king, etc.

They were in fact constructs that would do what I wanted them to.  So… how did they come to life?  Well… I had to think about it.  “This is the character, and I need him to behave this and this and that way.”  And then I tried to visualize the person who would do that.

At this stage, I know because I lurk when other writers discuss their process, many people will “interview” their characters.  I have no objection to doing that, except that it’s like research.  It’s easy to get lost in it, and it unleashes a flood of information that might or might not be relevant to the story.  Also, if the character comes alive in the middle of the interview, it becomes way too tempting to sit there and continue it, because then it’s fun.

But it is possible to do a logical back reasoning from ‘he needs to be unfeeling’ to the toughness that was required for him to survive his childhood, say.  And somewhere there, in the middle of writing the book, you’ll hit something – a flash of childhood memory, something like that – and suddenly the character comes to life.

Actually, even me, starting from the character out, I often find I’m “held out” of the character till I write something that suddenly lets me see into them.  See, even when you get your characters for free, getting to know them is like getting to know your friends.  You need to rub together a little and see them in all sorts of situations.  And no character or person in his right mind comes up to a total stranger and says “hi there, I’m a right bastard because my mom beat me with a wooden spoon when I was three, until the spoon broke.”  NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT.  But if you’re writing the story, you’ll suddenly get it.  And also that the mother beat him because he was playing in a place where the enemy could see him and thus discover the hideout of the remaining refugees of the half-killed race.  And she was afraid for her, for him, and for all their relatives.  And eventually he GOT that, so he can’t even resent her.  And now his being a right bastard makes sense, and he’s alive to you, just as a friend would be.

There’s another method some authors use which I didn’t even know about until I tried to collaborate with an established writer and he told me “Who is this character based on?  Do I know him?”  And then I found out this author writes everyone based on friends, acquaintances or public figures.  This is how he makes them come alive.  They come alive because he knows them.  He just slots the right person to the right goal, much like interviewing actors, I imagine.

I can’t FATHOM working like that.  I do have the occasional tuckerization, but it’s not like that, and it’s usually a secondary character into whose head I don’t get.

But it clearly works for him, since he’s a bestseller.  You might need to work that way.

There are ways to jog a recalcitrant character, too, one that is almost there but “hiding” – going to the sort of place the character might hang out in and soaking up the atmosphere, for instance, or looking through magazines (hairstyling mags are good for this) until you see a face that you go “That’s him!”  Or “That’s what she looks like!”  Or even finding the right name by looking through baby name books.  Or trying to picture the character’s daily routine.

Something will catch fire, and the character lives.

What if it never happens?  What if you write the book and you still think the character is a construct?

Don’t despair.  First, it happens to all of us – particularly in the old model of publishing which forced us to write from proposal and on demand.  Do enough books and eventually you’ll hit that point, eventually.  One character or another just won’t live for you.

And you know what?  It’s okay.  Just like with writing when you’re inspired and writing when you’re not, it doesn’t seem to mater, if you know enough craft.  Know enough craft and you can fake it.  The character will still not live for you – but he/she will live for the reader.  Trust me.

Sometimes when reading the book later – this just happened with one of my “rejects” then the character comes alive for YOU as a reader.  So it is there.  You just, for some reason can’t see it, at that time.

And that’s the ultimate ingredient for the character to come to life.

Look, whether you make up your characters wholesale, like Pygmalion sculpting Galatea, or you assemble them from spare pieces of your friends, like Frankenstein, in the end you need an extra touch to make it all come to life.

For Pygmalion that was the touch of the goddess.  For us writers, it is the reader.  If the character moves, breathes and becomes real in the reader’s mind – if the reader can think about him/her only as a friend, someone real, then we’ve done our job, no matter how we did it.

We’ve stolen the fire of the gods yet again.