This is the current Jane Austen fanfic which I’m continuing on Saturdays.  For past chapters, look here.  And for the immediate last chapter look two Saturdays back, before the holidays rudely interrupted by flight of fancy.  This Jane Austen fanfic thing is becoming quite fashionable, but rest assured that unlike “respected authors” this mere word-hack is not using Miss Austen’s work to score political or gender points.  Instead, I’m content to add elves, shake well and see what ensues.  (sigh)  I’ll never be a darling of the literary establishment. .

“Lizzy?” Jane asked.  “Are you well?”

“Very well, Jane,” Elizabeth said, but even the voice in which she said it seemed odd to herself, as though it came from someone else and some place else, faraway.  She was sitting in her room looking at the rose that the elf? Magical being? Had thrown her while she was at her window last night.

When she’d woken, from a restless sleep interwoven with nightmares, she’d thought it was all a dream, but there was the rose, shining gold and seeming full of life and vitality.  Like a living thing, she thought, as she caressed the petals.

She could sense Jane looming over her shoulders, she could sense Jane’s concern and her slight pause in breath as though hesitating.  “Only,” Elizabeth’s gentle sister said, at last.  “Only you’ve been here looking at that rose for ever so long.  And you aren’t dressed to go out.”

“Go out?” Lizzy asked.

“To my Aunt Phillips, remember?  There is a militia come to town and Aunt Phillips is holding a card party and musical evening, to allow local girls to get to know the officers.  Very handsome of her I call it, since she does not have any daughters of her own to find husbands for.”

“And perhaps that’s why she does it,” Lizzy said.

“Lizzy!  I’m sure she does it out of the kindness of her heart.  Or a genuine liking for people.”

And Lizzy, who did indeed think her aunt did things out of a genuine liking for people, or perhaps an earnest desire to be the center of attention, found herself at a loss as to why she’d said what she’d said, and in such a malicious and spiteful tone, too.  What was wrong with her?

She shook herself.  “I’d quite forgot,” she said.  “I shall make haste to dress.”

Later she wouldn’t be able to say what she’d thrown on, in her haste to be out the door, but it didn’t signify since when they got there all the people attending were quite the usual, except for a few officers far too young to have any interest in her or she in him.  Between those young officers and Lydia and Kitty, they’d convinced Mary to play a dance tune and were making quite a spectacle of themselves.

And then he walked in.  He was quite the most handsome man she had ever beheld.  No.  Beautiful.  He was beautiful.  Moonlight-blond hair and eyes of the same hue, which did not seem possible or natural, and a mobile, expressive countenance, graced with a mouth disposed to smile.  All this atop a tall, well-shaped male body.

And as soon as he entered the room, his eyes sough her and found her.  His smile became more pronounced and she remembered.  He was the man on the horse, throwing her the rose.

**************

“No, there can be no question of bringing them into fairyland,” Oberon snapped at Darcy, as though Darcy’s question were beneath contempt.  “Now that I’ve examined them better I can tell you that they have not that essential part of fairyland that will allow them to survive among us and be happy.  Oh, they have magic right enough, but not sufficient for them to be able to function as one of us.  And they will not function either as the humans who live among us, forever unaware of the magic currents around them.  Therefore it will be like seeing water within their reach and never drinking.  The human mind is not made for that.  they would go mad in short order.”

“But then what can you want me to do?”

“I want you to protect them,” Oberon said, his voice echoing thunderous.  “I want you to keep them from falling to the rebel’s schemes, Darcy.  If the rebel gets hold of them, or even one of them, they have enough magic and a link to my blood to allow him to strike magically straight at the heart of fairyland, and take out myself and your grandmother too, in one single attack.”

“But…” Darcy said, slowly.  “Aren’t you afraid that I too will somehow be seduced to the mortal world, as my mother was?”  He didn’t know why he asked it, unless it were for the wishful feelings brought up in his mind by the remembrance of what he now knew was his childhood in the mortal world.

Titania laughed and Oberon gave him an indulgent smile.  “Not you, Darcy,” he said.  “Of all our descendants you’re the one most proud of the blood of fairyland.  I know we can trust in you and be sure you’ll remain loyal.  Carola will see to it, too.  No.  Our only concern is that you warn these girls before the traitor has one of them wholly in his power.

You’d think I’d have learned not to tempt fate by now, right?  So, I sat down at nine to do another short chapter on Witchfinder.  The doorbell rang.  It was the furnace repairman who was supposed to come at noon, but had an opening sooner.  No sooner was he done than the power company turned off our power for three hours for “grid upgrades.”  By this time I’d lost my mind and decided to clean the basement which I’ve been putting off for eight years.  Now I’m covered in dust, I think there’s a spider on my back, and I never gave you your extra chapter.  But hey, I got the basement to where I can finish tomorrow early.

Now, I’m going to shower and spray insecticide on my back.  (Not really.  Stop worrying)

Oh, and “lasers” is my older son’s current all-purpose excuse.  “Why did you take my highlighter” “Because lasers” or “Why haven’t you taken the trash out yet?”  “Because, because, because… lasers!”  So, my excuse for no further chapter is LASERS!

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side and down.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet

And yeah, today’s chapter is on the short side.  I’ll post the next one by noon, unless something intervenes.*

For previous chapters, look here:  https://accordingtohoyt.com/witchfinder/

Bump In The Night
“You should be asleep,” Penny said.  And Seraphim knew that it was true.
He sat on the bed that had been freshly made and changed.  The smell of burnt feathers and the broth used to quench the fire was gone from the air.

And Penny, with bright efficiency, closed curtains and did other things.  He probably thinks I can’t see his magical work, Seraphim said.  That I don’t see him erasing the greasy feel of dark magic in the air, effacing any residual bad smell and making the entire room feel safe and secure.

It should be safe and secure too.  Penny knew his arcana, and at any rate he’d as much power as Seraphim, if of a different bend.  He could not secure the entire house, but surely, now that he was aware of danger he could secure this room.

But something still nagged at Seraphim, a sense of something gone very wrong, something unwinding, something…  Something he couldn’t quite pinpoint.  Making a stab at his feeling of uneasiness, he told Penny, “I’m not sure I can sleep, with Michael gone.”  And realized he was being uncharacteristically open.  It was not normal of him to talk about his missing brother.  To think about it, surely, and to mind his disappearance, of course, and to be restless in his longing to find Michael and save him.  But not to talk about it.  Seraphim had learned long before he became head of the family that too many people depended on him – as opposed to his volatile father – to allow him to show weakness or excessive concern.  He managed to discipline his face and say, “I beg your pardon, Penny.  I must be more tired than I realized.”

Penny nodded.  “What is amazing is that you’re not dead,” he said.  “As for Michael, we’ll find him,” Penny looked, in turn, very tired.  “There are certain things I can do.  And my mother might know something I can use as leverage to discover what has become of Michael, but most of all…”  He pressed his lips close.  “There is such a thing as single combat, and if it’s needed I will challenge my uncle.”  He closed his mouth again, his eyes flashing menace, and Seraphim was shocked to hear his own mouth pronounce, “Would you want it, Penny?  The throne of fairyland?”

Penny’s chuckle surprised them both.  At least it surprised Seraphim and it was followed by such a startled expression on Penny’s face that it would have been funny under other circumstances.  He smiled, after the surprise, and shook his head.  “You were not attending,” he said.  “There is this thing you mor– That people who have never visited fairyland or never lived there, and who have no elven blood in their veins, think, this idea that all fairyland is is enchantment and beauty and effortless magic.  You know that fairykind does not work the land, and does not make machines, and none of the contrivances of everyday life for a human, and you assume that it must be beautiful in the land of fairies, where no one ever need work, where nothing ever need decay, where no one ever grows old.

“To me it seemed like a cruel joke from the beginning, to hear it talked of as the isles of the blessed or the summer land.  It is beautiful, perhaps, as a naked sword can be beautiful in the sunlight, but it is…”  He hesitated.  He stood by the window where he had just drawn the windows closed, and now he turned to face Seraphim, and Seraphim noted how harsh Penny’s eyes looked, and how glittering, like the eyes of a man suffering from a fever.  “I can’t describe it, but if you can imagine a very sweet poison, or a very beautiful torturer’s chamber, you’ll be closer to understanding fairyland than most who never experienced it.  King?  I’d rather live forever among humans, cast off.  I’d rather be a beggar in London than a king in fairyland.”  He shook his head and took a deep breath, and Seraphim got the impression that he was disciplining his expression and his emotions to the realm of what was acceptable.  “Rest, Seraphim.  Tomorrow will be time enough to worry and to try to find Michael.  And that will be hard enough if you’re well.  With you ill and weak, it is hopeless.  And I know you know your duty to family and house too well to allow yourself the uncertainty and despair that will render you useless to them.  Someone is trying to kill you – and possibly me.  The fairyland is somehow enmeshed in these plans, and I forebear to guess on which side, though I doubt it’s mine.  And Michael is missing.  I thought, at first, that all of this, including getting you trapped in the betweener was just a side-result of our activities in other worlds. I thought someone, perhaps the Others that we’ve detected in those worlds, had tried to eliminate us and stop our bothersome rescues.  But now I think it’s much more than that – something so big that the borders of it seem to reach everywhere, and the tangle at its heart seems too huge and convoluted to make sense.  Still there is sense in it, and we will find it.”

He came over to the bed and reached for the mage light on Seraphim’s bedside table.  It extinguished at his touch, but then, as though thinking better of it, he brought it back to a dim glow, just enough to see the contours of the room.  Seraphim didn’t comment, but he had not kept his magelight on, even this low, since the age of ten at least.  So why would Penny think Seraphim wished it on now?  Or perhaps Penny was trying to assuage his own fears.  He turned to Seraphim now, “And the woman, Miss Felix, is mixed in it somehow?”
“On whose side?” Seraphim asked.
Penny shrugged.  “Well, she knew the man who tried to kill you,” he said.  “But perhaps we shouldn’t hold that by itself against her.  After all…”  He shook his head.  “I sense no harm for her.  And no fairy magic, before you ask.”

Seraphim wasn’t going to ask, but now that Penny had said it, he couldn’t get it out of his head.  He looked at his half-brother as he turned and said, “Well enough, now, I too must get my rest, and then we’ll see what we can do tomorrow in the light of day.  I’ve put wards in place.  Call me if you need anything.”  And then he was gone, which was good because for a moment Seraphim had feared that Penny meant to sit up all night by his bed, ensuring that another attack didn’t find Seraphim.

And I might very well not be able to sleep with him in the room, Seraphim said, and felt guilty about it.  He didn’t remember when he’d first found out that Penny had elf blood.  Not that first day surely, and not the second.  He suspected he’d discovered it either by listening to servant gossip – years ago, before they’d come to know Penny well, all the servants had been a little afraid of him – or by Penny himself telling him about it.  It felt as though Seraphim had always known it, though surely that wasn’t true, since at the very first he’d thought Penny was his full brother, brought into the family as a gift to him.  All of which showed Seraphim’s understanding of human reproduction had been both lacking and fanciful.  But all the same, he felt as if he’d always known that Penny was part fey.

And yet, in his heart, he’d never thought of Penny as anything but his brother.  Oh, his valet too, he supposed, particularly as they’d got older and had to learn to act their respective positions in public.  But most of all his brother and his friend.

So what had changed, now, that Penny’s presence in his room while he slept would feel less reassuring that vaguely threatening.  Was it all due to Seraphim’s memory of the chant in inhuman words?  Or was it…  Yes, it was Gabriel’s sudden slip of tongue, his almost referring to “mortals” to signify those unlike him, his talking about you as opposed to himself.  As though he didn’t consider himself human.  Wasn’t he?  Was Gabriel Penn some form of immortal?

And what did he mean by telling Seraphim – who’d never thought of it before – that Miss Felix didn’t have the blood of fairykind.  Seraphim didn’t like that preemptive denial.  Was it true?  Or was it part of that “me” and “you” that Penny suddenly seemed to divide the world into?

Oh, Seraphim believed Penny about the throne of fairyland.  At least he thought he did.  There had been too much loathing in Penny’s voice to be false.  But would he feel the same way about a creature like himself, half human and lost in the world of humans?  And was Miss Felix such?  There was something odd about her magic, Avalon born but learned by utterly alien means not even normal in any civilized world.

Seraphim stifled a groan as he sat up in bed.  He knew he was about to do something he’d regret.  He regretted it already, in fact, and yet it must be done. His silver-headed cane was resting against the bedside table.

He grasped the head and rose with the aid of the cane.  Getting on his feet was more difficult, but he managed it.  Putting on his dressing gown was only difficult because he must hold onto the bed with one hand or the other.

One of the advantages of having known Penny since they were both very young is that Seraphim knew exactly where Penny would have placed the spell that told him if Seraphim tried to leave the room.  And also that, having learned the earliest spells together, Seraphim knew Penny’s magical habits and how to disarm his traps.  At least he was fairly sure that if an alarm went out to Penny telling him his  magical alarm had been rendered ineffective, it would be delayed.

He walked down the hallway as fast as he could.  He must go to Miss Felix.  Somehow, it all hinged on her.  The world had been rational before her path crossed his.

Guest post by Kate Paulk

(This is a past post by Kate Paulk on MGC.  Kate is letting me run this today as I’m kind of out of it. [I blame antibiotics.].  She has some excellent insight on writing EVIL, which trust me, is very difficult.  Check out Kate’s books on Amazon, or her posts at MGC where she’s doing The Extreme Pantser’s Guide.)

 
This is a piece on writing the Evil Overlord from the Evil Overlord’s point of view – specifically, a character who is not merely opposed to the hero’s goals, but is actively, deliberately evil. This is a heck of a lot more difficult than you’d think, not least because many of us were raised in an environment where no-one truly believes in evil.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortage of examples of people who not only know damn well that what they’re doing is evil, they choose to do it anyway. Usually the emergence of someone like this is accompanied by flurries of excuses ranging from the banal – “His mother dressed him funny” – to the bewildered – “But… he seemed so normal.” That, or the all-purpose, “He’s insane” comes out, allowing people to slide back into comfortable normality and forget that yes, evil really does exist. After all, there are plenty of insane people, and plenty of people whose mother dressed them funny, and even insane people whose mother dressed them funny, and very few of them are evil.

Mostly, they’re rational, normal-seeming people, with one exception: I have never yet seen evidence of a truly evil person who does not consider his (or her, although so far most of them have been male) desires and needs more important than anyone or anything else.

Okay, so having got the generalities down – I’m not going into psychological diagnoses, since the goal is to write someone like this convincingly, not perform remote psychology – how do you write someone like this? What are their motivations, their goals?

In a word, power.

Everything I have seen and read indicates that an evil person always wants some kind of power. This doesn’t necessarily mean political power, but it always means the ability to control what people do. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to work with the fantasy standard of the Evil Overlord ruling a large chunk of the landscape and trying to get hold of the rest. I’ll even throw in all the usual cliches: the dark beasts that ravage the countryside, the armies of ferocious monsters, the works.

Okay, so. You can’t convincingly write someone’s point of view unless you understand how they think, and you can’t do that without becoming them, in a sense – which is why I describe it as channeling the character. This is why some authors can do a wonderful build-up with a shadowy, distant evil, but as soon as said evil is brought into the open, it turns out to be a nonentity that leaves readers wondering why people spent so much of the book frightened of it. It’s also why others never bring the evil on-stage at all, or simply opt not to have evil.

If you need the Evil Overlord, though, here are some ways to make him convincingly evil. First, you need to decide whether he’s a pragmatist or an idealist. Yes, evil can be idealist. There is no rule that says ideals have to be good: as a rough guide, if it claims that any group of humanity is in any way inherently of less worth than any other group of humanity, it’s probably not a good one (this is distinct from the achievements or actions of those groups – it’s talking about the value of people as fellow human beings and nothing more or less). From “People with blue eyes are less human than people with brown eyes”, the steps to “People with blue eyes aren’t really human” and from there to “talking animals”, “beasts”, and finally, “need to be exterminated” aren’t really all that large. (reference http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/03/29/the-man-in-the-mirror/)

An idealist Evil Overlord is likely to be utterly certain that his purpose in life is to guide people to the Truth, even if he has to kill them to do it. His Truth will include a perfect world, and an enemy group that isn’t really human. It doesn’t matter what the enemy group is: there has to be one to provide an external unifying force and a reason why the world isn’t already perfect. Usually he will portray himself as an almost godlike figure leading the chosen few to paradise – and in fantasy, he may well be a godlike figure.

If he is able to empathize with others – which is possible – he will empathize with them no more than normal people empathize with animals, at best. Regardless, he will take intense, sometimes even sexual pleasure in the knowledge that their lives are entirely in his control. Their knowledge that he controls them and that they have no escape merely increases his pleasure. Should they fail to worship him appropriately, he will lash out with what seems disproportionate rage: disagreement, however mild, brings the same response. His will and his alone is the only thing that matters. If reality fails to meet his expectations, then reality is at fault, and must be changed to match his desires. Killing hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people is at best a minor inconvenience – because he is the only person that matters. Everyone else is by definition of lesser value, and therefore expendable.

The true believer Evil Overlord is often intensely driven, using his kingdom as a proxy for his own status. Nothing less than conquest of everyone and everything that dares not to worship him will satisfy him – and probably not even that, although there aren’t any examples of anyone getting quite that far to extrapolate from.

It’s not possible to coexist with him: the mere existence of something outside his control and his ideals is sufficient reason to destroy it. No matter what ethical framework he uses, it does not apply to the enemy – and anything he does not control is the enemy. To the true believer Evil Overlord, “If you’re not with me, you’re against me,” is the cry of the wuss. His belief is “If you don’t worship me, I have to destroy you.”

He won’t think much, if at all, of his family. Every real-world case of this I’m aware of the family includes an absent father, a disinterested or marginalized mother, and minimal input or abuse from the rest of any extended family. That doesn’t mean that everyone with this background will become an Evil Overlord – it does mean that the character flaws typical of a true believer Evil Overlord are not mitigated in any way. I know people who have had to remind their children that just because other people are stupid (these are children whose intelligence is literally unmeasurable – while IQ is a reasonable ‘rule of thumb’ measure of computing capacity and strengths in particular processing areas (spatial vs verbal vs logic and so forth), the IQ of someone who aces the test is unmeasurable. Someone who almost aces it is also off the chart – they aren’t accurate more than a couple of standard deviations off the test norm, so when a 13 year old aces or nearly aces a test normed so that most adults will correctly answer approximately 25% of the questions, well… You might get one or two of those in a generation, and as far as that kid is concerned, everyone else in the world is dumb. If the kid is also short on empathy, you’ve got the makings of everyone’s nightmare, the genius Evil Overlord. Fortunately, most people at that level don’t want anything to do with other people – they’re like Leonard of Quirm and will be perfectly happy with unlimited time and space to play with ideas) doesn’t mean they aren’t human.

If he’s married, chances are it’s mostly a marriage of convenience or politics, and any children he has are mostly raised by his wife (obviously if the Evil Overlord is an Evil Overlady, it’s her children raised by her husband – it’s just that almost all the examples in fiction and life are male). He will probably see them more as symbols and tools for his goals than as people to love, and if they disagree with him, he will see that as betrayal, and act accordingly.

He will be reasonably intelligent and perceptive – able to see the weaknesses of the people around him and use them to advance himself and his cause (though the true believer Evil Overlord says otherwise it’s always in that order). Often the cause he follows will be something that has broad appeal, particularly to those without power when he begins his campaign. No matter which society you look at, those who have power are always a small minority. Something that attracts even a moderate percentage of everyone else will be able to topple or white-ant the ruling system, especially when led by an Evil Overlord who doesn’t care who he sacrifices in the process. They can always become martyrs to inspire the next generation and remind them how much they owe to him.

Perhaps the biggest flaw of this kind of Evil Overlord (who is probably more difficult to portray well than the pragmatic sort who will use any ideology needed to gain and keep power) is that he can’t understand why anyone would disagree with him. He knows that he’s doing evil things but his goal justifies that – so any disagreement with him must be disagreement with his goal which is, to him, by-definition-good. Anything is justified in pursuit of it, so anything that is in the way must be The Enemy and destroyed. He thinks in broad sweeps of generalization: in his world there are no individuals other than he himself.

Is there enough to portray a believable true believer Evil Overlord yet? It’s not a task for the faint-hearted. Writing them from the inside means thinking like them, albeit for a limited time, and that always leaves me feeling like I need to shower from the inside out. I’m still not sure whether I feel dirtier because being in the Evil Overlord’s mind doesn’t sicken and disgust me, or because I’ve been in the Evil Overlord’s mind. It’s a dark place to be.

Of course, me being me and having the hotline to evil bastard central in my head, a lot of my heroes tend to true believer Evil Overlord types with enough overrides that they don’t or won’t take that last step to true evil, and hover just this side of it in what turns into a quest for redemption. This may be why I can write the ones who are evil.

I’d give examples of well-written true-believer Evil Overlords, but right now I can’t actually think of any. I can’t even think of any good examples of the pragmatic type. Pratchett has quite a few characters who come close, like Lord Hong (pragmatic) and of course Lord Vetinari (also pragmatic and oddly likeable, which kind of disqualifies him). Who can give examples of really well written evil characters who take point of view?

Recently there has been some furore over a review of Dave Freer’s Dog and Dragon.  After Patrick Richardson posted his excellent and quite accurate review, not only did a gentleman (note I use the term loosely) feel the need to throw a big hairy hissy fit over the fact that no good fantasy has been written in the last twenty years and that since his writing idols wrote all possible plots twenty years ago no new ideas could be written BUT another gentleman (again a very loose term) felt the need to write an entire article on the grammar and typos in an UNCORRECTED ADVANCE READING COPY.

This is not designed to highlight the fact that some gentle– oh, heck – some cranks didn’t like Dave’s book.  The first didn’t read it, and the second read it looking for things to throw snitt-fits about.  Also, since the first took the time to comment on how wretched that Pratchett creature is, I think Dave should be rather proud of hanging with the good people.

No, this is designed to illuminate a type of person all of us, published, unpublished, wanna bes and serious workers at the word-vine will come up against, whether we want to or not.

Reading the screaming hissy fits above, what struck me was the pointlessness of it all, and it reminded me of an incident back when my husband and I were very young (a condition that’s often covalent with stupid, but in this case it was a good-stupid.)  After about six years of infertility treatments, when we were twenty eight we decided to take the option that had been suggested by everyone: take a long vacation.  Dan took a month unpaid break and we went to Portugal to get away from our normal environment for a while.  (This didn’t quite work as we didn’t conceive then, but we conceived shortly thereafter, so perhaps it was delayed effects?) A lot of this time was spent at the beach and one day in a fit of silliness, we decided to build a sand castle.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that an excess of geekness made this a whole day project and therefore caused us to build turrets and ramparts and an artesian fountain in the courtyard.

Towards the end of the afternoon, as we were finishing, we noticed a group of kids glaring at us – by which I mean glaring.  I wondered if it was a cultural thing since adults in Portugal rarely play in public or do anything that seems less than dignified.  But I was wrong.  As soon as we packed and turned our backs – and I mean, before we had gone three steps – the group attacked the little castle screaming and gleefully destroying it.

To this day I’m baffled by this behavior.  Yes, I know tearing down the castle is part of the fun when you made it for that purpose, but this wasn’t it.  They acted as if the castle were evil and had offended them in some way.  Besides, the castle wasn’t that type.  It was the type that I’m always delighted to come across, usually as the waves are starting to take it, and examine what people did and how.

I didn’t understand their anger or their impulse until years later, when I was trying to write for publication and we had a writers’ group.
There was a gentl– oh, heck, a crank – in the very first formation of our writers group who started every critique with “To begin with, this didn’t work for me.”

Now, I will be the first to note that when that group started, almost nineteen years ago, we were all green as leeks and twice as wet.  Sometimes, by blind groping, one or the other of us would produce a fully functional short story, but most of our poor efforts were truncated, deformed and went lurching into the night of unpublishable.

That said, none of us deserved the critiques this critter gave.  After that hopeful start, he would go page by page noting every time we’d misplace a comma (yes, dears, it IS a wonder he ever got through critiquing my stories.)  Then he’d open with something sweet like “Your grammar is a mess too” after which he would give us every single typo that might be misinterpreted as a grammatical mistake.  (What, you never left an apostrophe before the s in a plural?  Then you’re lucky.)  From this he would proceed to tearing down your character’s motives.  One of my characters, who was confused and rather paralyzed by a situation got classed as “supine”, doubts were cast on the character’s masculinity and, oh, yeah, do not dare in any circumstances to have a character who is anything but heterosexual because then the critique would include YOUR moral shortcomings.  This, by the way, even if the character was an alien from a species with three genders.

By the end of this spittle-flecked tear down, most of us would feel like never writing again.

Curiously, this person rarely brought anything in.  When he did it was usually a short short of such a startling lack of originality as to sound like the slush at any hundred magazines.  While competently written for the most part, the stories would provide plenty of fodder for those of us who wanted to go after commas or typos and, oh, yeah, by the way, the moral implications of some of these just-so stories, if you wanted to explore them, were … uh.

Fortunately he was so in-your-face poisonous that the rest of the group – fumbling and inexpert though we were – got together and decided we could not take it anymore.  As such, we tried to gently give him hints.  When that didn’t work, we changed the meeting time and day and place and told him the group had dissolved.  After which the group continued with what he had stigmatized as a “love in” – amazingly, we didn’t want to tear each other or even each other’s stories to shreds.  Who knew? – and shortly thereafter (two, three years) we all started getting published in turn.

Since then I have met variants of this gentleman everywhere, from local writing groups to reviewers.  They are not all as openly poisonous as this person or even the commenter and “reviewer” mentioned above.  Those are openly wreckers and though their motives might puzzle those of us on the creative side of the equation, their aggression and poison is as obvious as that of those kids on the beach.

Some commenters and reviewers are semi-reasonable and will be taken seriously at least for a while.  Take the “published author” who joined our group five years after this incident (she had a book published ten years before and had written nothing else.  We failed to take in the implications of this, because, duh, young and stupid.)  She was not so nakedly transparent in her tear downs, but she would say things that we felt we should understand, and which paralyzed us just as effectively, such as “Your story has no engine” or “your grammar is a mess” or… all of it with no specific examples.

I can honestly say she delayed our learning a good three years, until she left the group, after which we started writing more and getting published more again.  And it wasn’t until I had sold my first novel and told her about it that I realized she’d been just like Mr. “To Begin With This Doesn’t Work For Me.”

I realized it at that point because it was obvious.  First, she couldn’t process that the book had SOLD, even though I told her that first thing, and it was WHY she’d asked me to send her the manuscript.  Second, she simply didn’t GET it.  Third, she tried to tear it down as she had things in the workshop.  Her note back started with “You’ll never sell this book” and then told me that the story had no engine and that it read like a romance (a withering criticism coming from her) because of all the interior dialogue and the feelings.

Later on, through gossip (this field gossips) I found out the reason her career was benched was that, having been selected for a collaboration with Anne McCaffrey, she’d told Anne that her plot was all wrong and that she couldn’t plot.  Even Anne, who had a reputation as a gentle mentor, couldn’t take that.

BUT that in a way is almost endearing because it shows you how strong the compulsion is, to the point of being self-destructive, and how little it has to do with a wish to advance one’s career or even to help one’s fellow writer.

And that is where we must start to understand the wreckers.  I never knew those kids on the beach, though I wouldn’t be surprised to find any number of them are now hardened vandals – though frankly that wouldn’t make them much different from their age group in Portugal, the whole thing having to do with lack of jobs and possibly lack of supervision – but every other …  Let’s call them “Wrecker” I know is an unhappy, bitter person whose problems extend to far more areas of life than writing.  They’re also, almost to the last one, startlingly unproductive in terms of creativity, though claiming that they are “artists” or “creative.”  Oh, and when they do “create” the stuff tends to be pap and so generic as to need a white wrapping and a bar code.

That is part of the problem, I think.  These are people who were brought up thinking they were creative geniuses.  They have tried to be creative, have fallen short of their own ideals and want to – no, need to – tear down anything else anyone else builds, to salve the gaping wound in their ego and self esteem.  Unfortunately, they feel drawn to environments like writers’ groups where they’re forever reminded of how short they fell of their own expectations, and that frustration fuels their anger at anyone else who dares create and PARTICULARLY at any work that is particularly good.

Because these people infest the creative professions and often take over writers groups, and because in the new age of self-publishing they are gravitating to “reviews” I will give you a way to recognize them, deal with them and counter them.  Like vampires they can be relatively harmless if you know how to deal with them.  Like vampires too, they seem to be incurable.  At least I never heard of a single one who reformed and started creating.  It seems like once the wrecking urge sets in the pleasure of destruction feeds upon itself, and creation becomes impossible.

I will however also give you a way to combat your wrecker tendencies, in case you feel yourself going that way.

How To Recognize A Wrecker

1 – minute critiques of a story, even if you asked explicitly for an overall feel.  (You are excused if it’s your first time betaing, you’re overwhelmed and try, desperately, to do something useful.  We’ve all been there.)  If you asked for plot coherence and you’re getting typos, you’re either in the presence of a wrecker or your critiquer couldn’t find his/her own *ss with two hands and a seeing eye dog.  The later is curable, the first isn’t.

2 – Critiques that go beyond the manuscript to your personal traits, sometimes descending to over-the-counter Freudian.  This can range from “you know, I could never write a character that cowardly.” which subtly implies you can do that because you lack moral fiber to the fist-in-face blunt “I see you have another dumb character, just like you.” to the implication they know you better than you know yourself “Ah! Another species with three genders.  I wonder what that means about your sex life.”

3- Pointless nitpicking and sweeping generalizations.  You’ll get for instance that “your character lacks consistency” which turns out to be that at one point in your manuscript you wrote down he was blond instead of saying his hair was brown.  (Possibly because you heard “blond” off the corner of the room as you were typing.)  The critiquer will open with something like “your character kept changing and I had no idea who he was” and you think “Oh, I messed his personality” and it turns out to be something totally irrelevant that you can fix by changing a word.  Or “Your grammar is attrocious in this manuscript” and it turns out you have a dozen misplaced commas. *(Commas are a favorite nitpicking thing for wreckers, partly because they’re so easy to get “wrong” that each House has a different comma manual.  More on that at the end in footnote.)

4 – Stunning failure to produce, or really trite output, while, at the same time being deeply involved (often increasingly involved) in critiquing and reviewing and seeking out every opportunity to do so.

5 – Failure to be pleased with or admire anything they read since late adolescence or anything that is not universally considered a classic.  Even a few of those will bring out the sneers.  These are the people who sneer at Agatha Christie or well, tell Anne McCaffrey she can’t plot.  Yeah, I know my opinion of Dan Brown doesn’t bear repeating, but I’m willing to admit he must have done SOMETHING right.  (Just don’t pretend it was historical research, mkay?)  And I don’t care enough that people love his stuff to devote TIME to tearing him down.  There are many, many books I don’t like in the world.  I’m too busy writing MY OWN books to give much of a hang, frankly.

6- A new but consistent trait is the call for gatekeepers in publishing.  These people, as reviewers, rant, moan and bitch about the need for someone to keep the “sludge” out of the sacred halls of publishing.  This is particularly puzzling since by their own admission, publishing hasn’t produced anything worth reading for twenty years.

Yes, critique is important, but if you find the critique is both sweeping and detailed and always negative, you are in wrecker territory.

If someone’s critiques routinely shut you down, take a look at what you’re actually getting: is it important stuff you couldn’t get otherwise?  Some insight or detail that you’d never have seen (like in A Few Good Men Sanford noticed inconsistencies relating to clothing which I’d never noticed and were actually important.  Or Patrick went out of his way to research the behavior of a punctured oxygen tank.  While these are detail-oriented they are USEFUL.  And neither of them opened the critique with “First of all, what universe do you come from?” or “You have some serious inconsistencies” or… you get the point.)  Or is it an accumulation of nitpicky details and inconsistencies, some of them not real (a contest judge kindly informed me, for instance, that my vocabulary wasn’t up to par because when I used stolid, I meant solid – i.e. the judge didn’t KNOW stolid, so she assumed…) all presented in a way to make you feel dumb and incompetent and to elevate the critiquer to authority?

If the second be aware that this is a person who NEEDS to believe him/herself an authority.  The things to understand are the following:

1- this person can’t create.  Either he or she started out that way, or he or she has become that way, but in either case, he or she can’t create.  When in the presence of something that they feel is better than what they could do (which in terminal stages of the disease is EVERYTHING) they are driven to assuage their wounded ego by showing they’re better than the creator and giving themselves justification.

2- if his/her fury is particularly fierce, your work must be particularly good.

3- You MUST cut them out of your writing process.  Leave the group, or if the entire group complains, have him/her leave; stop giving them beta copies; stop reading their reviews.  Even totally misguided critique can cause the type of self-doubt that makes writing grind to a halt.  And if you become frustrated enough you could turn into a wrecker yourself.

This is another way in which wreckers are like vampires. Stay in a group full of them long enough and you will turn into one.

Part of this is learned.  You learn to see “flaws” because you’ve heard them pointed out so often, and, of course, in group critique sessions you want to prove you’re competent, even if you have all those “issues” they keep seeing in your writing.

Part of it is psychological.  By tearing down your confidence (however small.  Most writers have a hole where their confidence should be) they destroy your ability to create or to show what you create.  And then you have to salve your self-esteem by tearing down others and showing that really, it’s not just you…

IF you find yourself having wrecker- behavior: you find that a story is making you pick at flaws and point out everything the person did wrong.  Or you find yourself incensed at a story…  Walk away from that story.

Look, there are stories that will p*ss you off.  Some even written by friends.  There are published, award winning stories that make me froth at the mouth.  This usually has more to do with their theme or plot than their execution.

It is better to excuse yourself in those cases, than to vent your misguided fury on little things.  Because the wrecker behavior is an habit.

There is another thing – particularly with those you mentor – sometimes someone will write a story so startlingly and wonderfully perfect that you want to find a flaw in it SOMEWHERE.  It is a form of envy too, and a form of assuaging your wounded pride.  Don’t let it.  It is common, but it is wrong.  Just keep in mind that writing ability/careers criss cross.  The mentor today might be the pupil next time.  Compete only with yourself (unless you’re competing to produce MORE which is valid.) And rejoice when your friends make a big leap in craft.  Or, if you can’t rejoice, keep it to yourself and go and practice your own craft.

While I don’t advise staking wreckers, they are exactly like vampires.  They can no longer walk in the light and the sun, and they’re trying to drag you down to their own bitter state.  Let them go their own way, and you go on creating.

* Commas are a favorite target of wreckers.  Most of us – except me, and there are reasons for that – think we know how to place commas.  Most of us can advise people to diagram sentences or some other solution.  The thing is that, except for extremes, commas are highly individual.  We can safely say my mother – who uses them in lieu of periods, which she reserves for the end of the letter or essay, I suppose to signal the missive is over and you should avoid continuing to read what’s not there (and yes, we all tease her about this.  She ignores us.) – is wrong.  We can also say I tend to overuse commas.  (The reason I do so is that my first instruction in punctuation was in romance languages.  The way you separate clauses and parentethicals and emphasize bits of the sentence that English language doesn’t.  And even though I know the rules for commas in English, the instinct to use them is older than that.  I can “glue on” comma sense by doing grammar exercises obsessively in my free time.  And I would if I didn’t have so much else to do.)
But even for native speakers, commas can be QUITE individual.  If they weren’t then each house wouldn’t change them in different ways (Baen tends to add commas to my writing, while Berkley takes them out to the point that some sentences are incomprehensible in my opinion.)

Being subjective, commas of course attract wreckers like honey attracts flies.  In fact an obsession with critiquing your commas), (unless you’re Amanda, to whom I’ve given control over mine because I KNOW I need a minder and she’s generally sensible on those :-P   And note, though she teases me as I do my mother, it’s NEVER a tear down) is a sign of a wrecker.  Particularly if that’s all they find, or almost all they find, and if they make a big deal out of it.

The Peak And The Fall

Sometimes books that up till the last third were holding my interest finish and leave me curiously unsatisfied.

To make things clear – a good novel is like climbing up a mountain.  Yes, there are rest stops, there are sheltered areas and small peaks from which you can see the beauty of the surrounding countryside.  But the overall motion should be ever-upward towards your goal in that snow capped peak.  And the peak allows you to look out over everything that came before and in a way encapsulates it and gives it meaning.  Then there SHOULD be either a gentle descent on the other side – at least partway – or a shot of the people at the base of the mountain again, or even (in novels that are one of a tightly connected series) a few moments at the lodge at the summit, relaxing over hot chocolate and doughnuts.

One of the mistakes, of course, is to just get to the peak, give a brief glimpse of the countryside, then end the novel there.  This drives me bonkers though for a good while it was advised by all the how-to books and it still might be.  But some of it is not stylistic and on purpose.  It’s either incompetence of simple lack of interest at the end.

It is, to use our mountain metaphor, as though your characters were climbing up the mountain, battling fatigue and blizard.  And then, when the top is within view a helicopter picks them up and sets them on the summit.  Wouldn’t you feel cheated?  I do.

The cause for this is usually “creating a challenge so big your characters can’t face it.”  I.e. the way you setup the bad guy is so perfect, so massive, so strong, that your character could never win.  So in the end the bad guy has a nervous breakdown, or makes a stupid mistake, or – and unfortunately at least one major talent in fantasy uses this consistently – the gods or their equivalent intervene and takes your heroes’ fat out of the fire.

You can tell when you’re approaching one of these climaxes because you’ll be building up to the big confrontation and have four pages left on your book.

My advice if you have this problem is that you brainstorm it.  Get two or three of your writing buddies together, order a pizza, tell them the problem and let them shoot solutions at you.  The sad thing is that we’re not that smart.  We might set up a problem WE can’t solve, but everyone has blind spots, and your buddies will see them and suggest ways for character to get around “invincibility.”  If all else fails, go back and seed a subtle weakness in the villain.

Then you have the problems I had with my last two books.  The first had a climax before the climax, so that the climax felt like deja vu or a let down.  I went in and toned down the first climax and heightened the second.  There’s still a break – can’t be avoided – but now it feels intentional rather than an author goof.  (I hope.)

For climax par excellence I recommend the cave scene in Thud by Terry Pratchett.

Or the second, where the villain is not a person and is really too big for the main character.  Bambi can fight Godzilla, but he needs to do it in stages and over several books.  I had to add and heighten the climax then give a hint of future victory.  I took the technique from old war stories, which I used to read.

Now, after you’ve reached that summit…

When I started writing mystery, the how-to books informed me that a) cozy mysteries weren’t real mysteries, because most crimes were solved by the real pro.  (And fiction, naturally must be real.  Oh, wait.)  b) mysteries should end the minute the bad guy was caught, because that was the whole point of the book.

Honestly, the first should have served as warning that the second was full of er… hot air.  Because the first misses the whole point of mystery as a morality play.  The fact that an average person solves the mystery has important symbolical and moral echoes that are totally lacking in “professionals” doing it, for one.  For another, mystery, even hard boiled is not and can not be an accurate depiction of murder investigations, because most of those are about as exciting as any other day-to-day job.

However, I was young and very stupid, and though I couldn’t follow the first, I tried to follow the second.  With the result that all my first readers moaned and asked what I was doing.  “I feel like you left me in the air” was the common complaint.

So now I try to have at least two or three pages where I show the world back to its place and everything well.  This is sometimes just a conversation (A Few Good Men) or Tom’s father coming into the diner (Draw One In The Dark, Gentleman Takes A Chance) to order the title of the next book (Noah’s Boy) as a dish.

This “back to the normal world” or “they lived happily for at least a little while” is apparently ancient, being part of the hero’s journey.

It is also, judging by my fan mail, often what makes a book for the fan.  They went through the climax with the hero and they bled virtually if not in fact with the hero.  Now they want their wounds bound and their world set right with the hero.  When you give it to them, they’re ridiculously grateful.  And they’ll walk away wanting more of your books.

I’ve generated a coupon at Smashwords.com to take my short story Castor (in the Darkships Universe) free. Just go here http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/105432 and enter coupon code RZ45W

Waiter, There’s Soup In My Novel

Yes, it is possible to write an interesting – even riveting – book and make it feel boring or at least “blah” when you reach the end.

The most difficult of these to cure is when you turn your book into soup.

What do I mean by soup?  I mean you throw everything in but the kitchen sink and that only because it’s attached and you can’t find the crow bar.  It starts out to be a book about gnomes, but by the time you’re done you’ve got the entire fairy kingdom in there, and dragons, and spaceships, and aliens, and perhaps a three-legged hedgehog.  I’d call it stew, except that this “adding on” effect actually dilutes the result, so it’s more like soup.

This is a bad tendency of mine.  It started, I think, from my being young and an idiot and wanting to make books “real” by throwing in elements that weren’t directly related to the plot.  I learned the folly of that, but I’ve never lost the tendency to overcomplicate things.  It might be innate.  Look, I used to fail the easy tests because I thought “It can’t be that simple” and then credited my teachers with far more cunning than they ever had.

So I have trouble keeping books simple.  In fact, the longer I spend working at a novel, the more complex it becomes.  If I do more than three revisions, you can guarantee it will be soup.

How do you fix that?

The way I use most often is the “run to the finish.”  If I leave myself very little time, I can’t throw in everything.  The faster my books are written, the cleaner they feel.

But you already wrote the book, and there’s ham and beets and a bit of radish floating in it, and none of it works together.  Well, you’re in luck.  A book is only like soup to a point.  If you haven’t put it out yet, it’s not “cooked” and you can remove elements the readers will NEVER know about.

My suggestion is that you start by deciding what the dish – er – novel is.  If you have time, set it aside and let it rest, then come back at it in a month or three.  You’ll be amazed how the original plan stands out clear and the rest as accretions.  It’s then very easy to prune.

Failing that, decide what the novel will be about.  You’re either writing beets or radishes.  Make a decision and stick to it, then carefully and rationally remove everything that sticks out.  The result won’t be heart’s blood, but it will coherent.

The more difficult part of this is “How To Finish With A Bang” which I’ll do tomorrow, because it requires more concentration than I can muster on the last day of vacation.

I’m going to write a bit, put up a few stories, then go for a walk.  Hopefully I finish this series tomorrow and can then edit it, convert it, and put it somewhere for ya’ll to download.

New Year, same technological ineptitude.  And here, I was hoping changing the calendar fixed it!  (And what a calendar it is, this year’s calendar is this)

So, you’ll have to do the work.  Click here for your New Year’s Card from me.

Update:  For those who missed this.  Any Sony readers out there, go to smashwords and look for books published by Goldport Press (or myself and Sylvia Haute)  Pick one, and I’ll take the one with most votes free for a week, since I can’t give you Neptune’s Orphans free for New Year’s gift (It’s Amazon only.)

2011 has been more fun than a barrel of frisky monkeys.  And I mean that in both the ironic and the straightforward sense, which right away tells you what kind of year this has been.

You keep hearing of people saying things like “This has been unbelievable” or “before now I could never have believed.”

For publishing, why don’t we call 2011 the year the world turned upside down?

Let’s leave alone the fact that this year I won the Prometheus Award.  It’s long been a joke in my house that I’ll win awards when hell freezes over.  Well, I hope the little demons have earmuffs.  And of course, of all awards, this is the one I most wanted.  I don’t fully believe it, still, but I’m very happy.  It’s particularly gratifying that I won it for a novel I couldn’t sell for THIRTEEN years.

Then there’s the economic side of this career.

When this year started, I thought my career was nearing its end.  Not that I was as anguished as when this happened before, because it didn’t seem to be my fault, and really there wasn’t much I could do about it.  The publishing industry just seemed to be winding down.  There were articles saying in the future every book would be free and everyone would starve, and I was fighting that idea as hard as I could but afraid it would be like that for a few years.   Also, fewer of my books were selling (to publishers) and at that I was one of the lucky ones who was still working.

And then… And then things changed.  The world turned upside down.  For me.  At some point I realized that the security of traditional publishing wasn’t worth the aggravation most publishers seem to have built in, or the …  Let’s just say in the coming year there will be talk of statements and what relation they bear to reality leave it at that.

So I decided — with trepidation — to do what Dave Drake had advised me, oh…  seven years ago?  Never work for publishers you don’t personally like and respect.  Which, as most of you know, leaves me with Baen.

Baen is not enough — at least not YET — to support me, and besides, you guys know I like to write tons of things that don’t fit the Baen mold.  SO I was pushed kicking and screaming into indie publishing.

It’s been…  Three months? since Goldport Press has existed, and so far I have out two dozen short stories and two collections.  So, how is that going, Sarah?  Well, no, I can’t live from it.  But if I had up all the short stories whose rights have reverted and they earned at the same rate as the ones I do have up, I would be making a book advance from those — from OLD stories, already written and half of them already paid for.  More interesting, the earnings grow week to week, even when I don’t put up new stuff.

And I hear from friends doing this the real money is in novels.

Of which I have about 20 in various stages of completion, which either agent (quite a few) or publishers rejected.  These run the gamut from paranormal romance to mystery to (even) a couple of science fiction that I feel squirmy about sending to Baen, for various reasons.  Some of these novels, really, just need a thorough revision.

So, here’s where I stand at the end of 2011 — I’m if not confident very hopeful I can make a living from Indie publishing and Baen.  I’ve also discovered — thanks to the possibility of Indie publishing and having written a novel I’m still not sure Baen will take because I knew I could publish it myself — that I write BETTER, enjoy it more, and really, can write faster (I know, but it’s true) on spec than under contract.  It’s something psychological.  I’d guess when work is due it becomes “homework”.

My first order of business, therefore, is to crawl out from under the three contracts extant.  Then I’ll start going through the shelved books.  I’d like to bring out one of those a month, starting in February.  Also, of course, I’ll continue bringing out the short stories.

For those who enjoyed my shorts in the urban fantasy series, I intend to write a few more, and publish a volume of Nephilim Kentucky III Investigates.  There will also, I’m so sorry, be more nuns in space.

In the meantime, I’ve got New Year’s preparations to make.  Everyone have a happy one, and may your future be so bright you have to wear shades.

And as a sort of New Year’s Gift (yes, I’m feeling very Russian…  It’s the accent) I took Neptune’s Orphans free on Amazon.

Don’t count on a free short story a week, but I figured you guys could use amusement your last week of holidays…