I’m not really blogging today.  Not in any meaningful sense.  This blog while it appears to be a blog is really a bunch of disgruntled musings.

“Why are you not blogging today, Sarah?”  Well, because I’m laying down words very fast on my Nanowrimo novel and writing non fiction might pop me out of the mood.  Also because frankly I am still in shock from having to seriously hurt a character yesterday.  “What do you mean having to seriously hurt a character, Sarah?  Don’t you know they don’t exist?  Don’t you know that hurting them is a needed thing for the plot?”  I mean shut up, shut up, shut up.  Yeah, you’d think after almost thirty years of writing I’d treat my characters as disposable widgets that go in and do what they’re supposed to and then die or go off or something, or at least stop existing for me.  Ah!  You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.

Oh, there is a certain distance I can achieve in short stories, particularly.  I can write a story where the character really is there for the purpose of x.  But the novel characters?

Look, I’ve got no illusions about myself.  I am primarily, if not exclusively, a character writer.  The last twenty six years have been a long, slow, often hopeless struggle to learn how to plot because I realized no character exists in vacuum (well, unless it’s my short story In The Absence Of Light published by Naked Reader Press recently — coff)  For the character to show to best advantage, you need to show him/her pitting him/herself against something — usually adversity.  The exception — sorta — is my refinishing mysteries, which are truly “novels of the quotidian” with the thinnest of plots as excuse.  Weirdly, no, I don’t want to write those all the time.

So, I must write characters facing adversity.  (Note for the religious — this is how I view the problem of evil in the world.  Without it, G-d would be up a creek for a plot!)

But here’s the rub — to me, if not to the readers — the characters exist pre-plot.  And if they weren’t fascinating people and most —  though admittedly not all — of of the main characters are people I’d like to know and be friends with (though some of them I’d need to keep thorazine handy for.)  That is why they are my main characters, because I couldn’t resist playing with them and spending time with them.  Heck, look at Athos, who isn’t even MY character and whom I’ve now stolen to have my wicked way with in TWO series.  (And in Sword and Blood my way is VERY wicked indeed.)

Does it hurt when I have to hurt them?  You bet.  Do I hurt them even harder in consequence?  Oh, yeah, because I know that will make their eventual triumph tastier both for me and my readers.  Does this mean it’s easier to drag them through hell by their heels?  Oh, heck no.  Really no.

I just had to seriously hurt one of the main characters in the current book AND have the other one feel guilty for it and unable to do anything — at least unable until I run him into a corner and he snaps, when we’ll get… explosions, blood and mayhem.

I prefer the explosions part.  I feel beat and battered and need to go write them out of this fix, but I don’t want to go back there.

(Incidentally, and a subject for a post when I’m not feeling emotionally rubbed raw — part of this relationship with characters is what made writing proposals and only selling at best 75% of them so grueling.  You had to love them, bring them to life and live them.  Not good for any creator.  On the good side, I now have about 20 novels where the plotting and the first three chapters [i.e. half the work] is done and which are ready to finish and bring out.  I’m so looking forward to 2012 and the possibilities it brings.)

Now I’m going to shower, and then I’m going to spend the afternoon dragging my characters through hell (The current book section is called Come Hell.)  Not literally.  This is the Earth of Athena’s time.  But … close enough.

Pity the poor writer who must hurt her creatures…

*First chapter here  Third chapter here.   Yes, I’m lazy.  But mostly, frankly, I just woke up.  This week has not been good for sleeping, between snowstorms throwing all our schedules askew and various due dates bugging me.  So, I slept till almost noon central, almost ten my time — which doesn’t happen but once every few months.  The explanation for this, for late arrivals is that I started this story for Austen fandom years ago, but have never finished.  It’s a desecration of Pride and Prejudice.  I threw elves at it.  Literature purists, feel free to avert your eyes and cry.  If this gets enough following on this blog, I’ll finish it.  If not, I’ll let sleeping fanfic lie.  First chapter is here*

II

Through the great hall at Netherfield, Lord Darcy came striding. Though the palace at Netherfield – ancient and honored – was the seat of his friend Duke Carolus Bingley, it was now hosting the most high court of Fairyland and the Elven Realms of Avalon. As such, its great hall had been outfitted with the twin thrones of the king and queen of the elven realms in these isles, and – because the kingdom was in danger – filled with every great Lord and Lady, every prince, every duke, every mere baron that held land and magic in the kingdom.

Lord Darcy entered, without bothering to change out of his riding attire. The silver spurs on the well polished boots that encased his legs up to the knees, struck sparks from the polished marble floors. The court parted, like clouds when the sun appears. The ladies lined, on either side of the path he strode through, and knelt one after the other, as he passed, turning to him their flower-like countenances which sparkled with admiration of his fine figure, his glossy black locks and the grey eyes which shone as though bits of silver had got caught deep within.

The faces fell as they saw who followed him – the proud Carola Bingley, his fiancé, who looked at them all as though they were beneath her contempt. Lord Bingley, with his softer features and his vague smile, would have encouraged them to come forward, but Carola was jealous of her position and prerogative.

Ten steps before the throne, Prince Darcy stopped and bowed deeply but did not kneel. The grandson of the king, and his heir – who would be king whenever Oberon should go forth to the isles of the blessed – he was the highest born there, save the sovereigns.

“Speak grandson,” Oberon said, from his throne, his voice deep like thunder and rolling over the court like a wave. “What have you found? The boundaries of our land, are they secure? What signs of the rebels? Is there any magical defiling? Any show of his encroaching?”

Darcy bowed again, a contained gesture. His features froze into somber-seeming stillness, as though he had of a sudden turned to a statue. “Noble Oberon,” he said. “I would not deceive you. Though I found no explicit sign of the rebel, I could taste the flavor of his foul magic, the touch of his followers on hill and glade.” He hesitated. “The home you spoke of, fifty years ago, but three miles hence, is now inhabited by a family and not, as you had said, just a lonely old man. And that family…” He struggled for words while Oberon watched. “That family, oh noble king, has five daughters, all fair virgins of… of distinguished lineage. Far away, and in their mother’s line they are of your own blood, your majesty.”

“Five virgins,” Oberon said, frowning slightly. “Of my blood. The rebel will never resist this. He will come for them.”

“So I thought,” Darcy said. He bit the side of his lip, lost in thought. “And being that though they are mortals, they are of your blood, I think we have only two options…”

The king looked at him and then said, his voice terrible as the thunder that announces a storm. “I see only one,” he said. “We must bring them to us and find them marriages and keep them safe, deep within our palace.”

Something like pride or disdain twisted Darcy’s lips and his eyes flashed. “Bring them within? Oh, no your majesty. For though they are descended from you, many generations of mortals have poured their coarse, impure stuff into their veins. You’d not allow them to thus pollute the shades of fairyland!”

Oberon opened his lips, as though to say something, then closed them. “What do you suggest, then, grandson?”

“Two things we can do and one of them is to wrap them tight in spells so that they won’t consider the intruder or go with him, or even think of him, or of believing his foul lies.”

“And the other?” Oberon said. His lips twisted in turn. It was well known that since the Bard incident he didn’t approve of putting spells on any humans, be they ever the rudest of mechanicals. Besides, Darcy knew, every sense would revolt at the idea of spelling his descendants, no matter how remote.

“The other is that, under some disguise or contravention, dressed as mortals, behaving as they do, we meet them and warn them.”

“I like that idea better,” Oberon said. “It doesn’t do, grandson, no matter your opinions, to treat humans as though they were mere cattle. They are our cousins, in body and in magic, and deserve better treatment than the deer in the forest, whom we bespell to our traps.”

Darcy pressed his lips together but, in public, forbore to argue with his grandfather. Instead, he bowed again. “We have found, through the minds of the sleeping mortals, that an assembly is held every month, in Merryton, the nearby city. That is a … ball… A dance. Carolus Bingley and I have spoken, and we think the best thing would be for us to arrive in Merryton perhaps a day or two before and to attend this assembly under the guise of mortals. There, we’d talk to the young women – their name is Bennet – under pretext of dancing with them, but… your majesty… if words fail… then we must try spells.”

“If words fail….” the king conceded.

It wasn’t till later, in the receiving room of his private quarters, having changed from his riding attire into a blue velvet suit of doublet and knee breeches that sparkled like the deep summer sky strewn with distant stars, that he turned to Carolus and said, “I believe my grandfather means well, but I don’t see why we can’t just spell the mortals from a distance. To have to mingle with them will make for an unbearable evening.”

Golden haired Carolus Bingley sitting near him, laughed heartily. “It is no so bad, Darcy,” he said. “It will be great amusement. It is years since we dropped in at a mortal feast, since our king disapproves of it. I am sure there will be many pleasant people and many uncommonly pretty girls.”

Darcy smiled at his friend. Though they were very different from each other, the prince and the duke had been friends since childhood. And though he did not agree with Carolus, he couldn’t help being amused by him. “You, Carolus, are ever pleased with your company elf or mortal.”

“I just don’t see any reason,” Lord Bingley, Duke of Silver Bells, said, “For going through the world disapproving of everything and everyone.”

But Carola Bingley who sat nearby, admiring her golden beauty on a mirror, turned her passionless eyes to Darcy and said, “I will go with you, milord. I’ll make an unbearable evening perhaps not so terrible.”

Darcy’s gaze flickered onto his fiancé and he said “Yes, that will make it easier.”

“Do you really think we might have to put spells on them?” Bingley asked.

“I very much fear so,” Darcy said. “Mortals are not known for their rationality.” He turned at a sound of soft footsteps behind him. There stood, in the half-light of his sparsely but beautifully furnished domain, a young girl in a flowing green silk dress, her blond hair loosened down her back, her green eyes making her look like something untamed and quite fearful of approaching other creatures.

Prince Darcy’s features split in a wide smile, “Ah Georgiana,” he said, softly. “Come sister. Come and play for us.”

As the young girl sat before the harp, the music poured from her sweetly precise fingertips to fill the entire palace and leak out into the mortal night to enchant unwary passerbye.

Lydia had talked of nothing else all the way to the assembly in the carriage. “And they say there are two gentlemen, and both wearing such fine things and paying with such liberality that, perforce, they must be very wealthy. And…”

But nothing prepared Lizzy for the shock she received when, on entering the assembly, Sir William Lucas begged to make known to the Bennets “Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley.”

There they were, one dark and one blond, but both unmistakably the men she’d seen riding in outlandish costume in the moonlight just a few days before. Were they elves? Or had she dreamed all? Or were they just men of the ton in search of fresh amusement?

Through the great hall at Netherfield, Lord Darcy came striding. Though the palace at Netherfield – ancient and honored – was the seat of his friend Duke Carolus Bingley, it was now hosting the most high court of Fairyland and the Elven Realms of Avalon. As such, its great hall had been outfitted with the twin thrones of the king and queen of the elven realms in these isles, and – because the kingdom was in danger – filled with every great Lord and Lady, every prince, every duke, every mere baron that held land and magic in the kingdom.

Lord Darcy entered, without bothering to change out of his riding attire. The silver spurs on the well polished boots that encased his legs up to the knees, struck sparks from the polished marble floors. The court parted, like clouds when the sun appears. The ladies lined, on either side of the path he strode through, and knelt one after the other, as he passed, turning to him their flower-like countenances which sparkled with admiration of his fine figure, his glossy black locks and the grey eyes which shone as though bits of silver had got caught deep within.

The faces fell as they saw who followed him – the proud Carola Bingley, his fiancé, who looked at them all as though they were beneath her contempt. Lord Bingley, with his softer features and his vague smile, would have encouraged them to come forward, but Carola was jealous of her position and prerogative.

Ten steps before the throne, Prince Darcy stopped and bowed deeply but did not kneel. The grandson of the king, and his heir – who would be king whenever Oberon should go forth to the isles of the blessed – he was the highest born there, save the sovereigns.

“Speak grandson,” Oberon said, from his throne, his voice deep like thunder and rolling over the court like a wave. “What have you found? The boundaries of our land, are they secure? What signs of the rebels? Is there any magical defiling? Any show of his encroaching?”

Darcy bowed again, a contained gesture. His features froze into somber-seeming stillness, as though he had of a sudden turned to a statue. “Noble Oberon,” he said. “I would not deceive you. Though I found no explicit sign of the rebel, I could taste the flavor of his foul magic, the touch of his followers on hill and glade.” He hesitated. “The home you spoke of, fifty years ago, but three miles hence, is now inhabited by a family and not, as you had said, just a lonely old man. And that family…” He struggled for words while Oberon watched. “That family, oh noble king, has five daughters, all fair virgins of… of distinguished lineage. Far away, and in their mother’s line they are of your own blood, your majesty.”

“Five virgins,” Oberon said, frowning slightly. “Of my blood. The rebel will never resist this. He will come for them.”

“So I thought,” Darcy said. He bit the side of his lip, lost in thought. “And being that though they are mortals, they are of your blood, I think we have only two options…”

The king looked at him and then said, his voice terrible as the thunder that announces a storm. “I see only one,” he said. “We must bring them to us and find them marriages and keep them safe, deep within our palace.”

Something like pride or disdain twisted Darcy’s lips and his eyes flashed. “Bring them within? Oh, no your majesty. For though they are descended from you, many generations of mortals have poured their coarse, impure stuff into their veins. You’d not allow them to thus pollute the shades of fairyland!”

Oberon opened his lips, as though to say something, then closed them. “What do you suggest, then, grandson?”

“Two things we can do and one of them is to wrap them tight in spells so that they won’t consider the intruder or go with him, or even think of him, or of believing his foul lies.”

“And the other?” Oberon said. His lips twisted in turn. It was well known that since the Bard incident he didn’t approve of putting spells on any humans, be they ever the rudest of mechanicals. Besides, Darcy knew, every sense would revolt at the idea of spelling his descendants, no matter how remote.

“The other is that, under some disguise or contravention, dressed as mortals, behaving as they do, we meet them and warn them.”

“I like that idea better,” Oberon said. “It doesn’t do, grandson, no matter your opinions, to treat humans as though they were mere cattle. They are our cousins, in body and in magic, and deserve better treatment than the deer in the forest, whom we bespell to our traps.”

Darcy pressed his lips together but, in public, forbore to argue with his grandfather. Instead, he bowed again. “We have found, through the minds of the sleeping mortals, that an assembly is held every month, in Merryton, the nearby city. That is a … ball… A dance. Carolus Bingley and I have spoken, and we think the best thing would be for us to arrive in Merryton perhaps a day or two before and to attend this assembly under the guise of mortals. There, we’d talk to the young women – their name is Bennet – under pretext of dancing with them, but… your majesty… if words fail… then we must try spells.”

“If words fail….” the king conceded.

It wasn’t till later, in the receiving room of his private quarters, having changed from his riding attire into a blue velvet suit of doublet and knee breeches that sparkled like the deep summer sky strewn with distant stars, that he turned to Carolus and said, “I believe my grandfather means well, but I don’t see why we can’t just spell the mortals from a distance. To have to mingle with them will make for an unbearable evening.”

Golden haired Carolus Bingley sitting near him, laughed heartily. “It is no so bad, Darcy,” he said. “It will be great amusement. It is years since we dropped in at a mortal feast, since our king disapproves of it. I am sure there will be many pleasant people and many uncommonly pretty girls.”

Darcy smiled at his friend. Though they were very different from each other, the prince and the duke had been friends since childhood. And though he did not agree with Carolus, he couldn’t help being amused by him. “You, Carolus, are ever pleased with your company elf or mortal.”

“I just don’t see any reason,” Lord Bingley, Duke of Silver Bells, said, “For going through the world disapproving of everything and everyone.”

But Carola Bingley who sat nearby, admiring her golden beauty on a mirror, turned her passionless eyes to Darcy and said, “I will go with you, milord. I’ll make an unbearable evening perhaps not so terrible.”

Darcy’s gaze flickered onto his fiancé and he said “Yes, that will make it easier.”

“Do you really think we might have to put spells on them?” Bingley asked.

“I very much fear so,” Darcy said. “Mortals are not known for their rationality.” He turned at a sound of soft footsteps behind him. There stood, in the half-light of his sparsely but beautifully furnished domain, a young girl in a flowing green silk dress, her blond hair loosened down her back, her green eyes making her look like something untamed and quite fearful of approaching other creatures.

Prince Darcy’s features split in a wide smile, “Ah Georgiana,” he said, softly. “Come sister. Come and play for us.”

As the young girl sat before the harp, the music poured from her sweetly precise fingertips to fill the entire palace and leak out into the mortal night to enchant unwary passerbye.

Lydia had talked of nothing else all the way to the assembly in the carriage. “And they say there are two gentlemen, and both wearing such fine things and paying with such liberality that, perforce, they must be very wealthy. And…”

But nothing prepared Lizzy for the shock she received when, on entering the assembly, Sir William Lucas begged to make known to the Bennets “Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley.”

There they were, one dark and one blond, but both unmistakably the men she’d seen riding in outlandish costume in the moonlight just a few days before. Were they elves? Or had she dreamed all? Or were they just men of the ton in search of fresh amusement?

Back when I was a beginning writer we used to do something – and we got the idea from stories Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith told.  (No, this does not mean we killed our secret pen names in a love triangle murder suicide, though – given mine – it’s something I have considered on occasion.  Well, I’ve considered killing them, and a love-triangle murder suicide is JUST what they all deserve.  I’ll make it in sordid circumstances!)

First I must explain that much as I hate to admit it, we writing couples are different.  Sorry.  We’re wonderfully, amazingly, extraordinarily more… dorky than anything you non-writing couples can imagine.   Starting in the mists of time, when the kids were toddlers, I heard of other couples having “date nights” every week.  This seemed a little odd, since we got in our dating time the first year of marriage, like we were supposed to (at least like we were supposed to, because we never dated before marriage, due to the Atlantic Ocean being in the way and never moving out of the way, not even when we nudged it with our knee.)

But we did have our very own equivalent of date nights.  Since waaaay back then we didn’t have a writing group and the very concept was somewhat alien, and since I spent my writing day surrounded by non-verbal people, sometimes I just needed to talk a plot point out.  So when Dan got home I’d already have called our friend who would babysit for us (not afraid of way too smart kids – hi Charles!) and be ready to go.  We’d pick some place with slow service, a quiet atmosphere and servers with nerves of steel.  The latter was very needed since otherwise they panicked when they heard us discussing body disposal methods.

Well, Kris and Dean talked of something similar – the intensive writing retreat.  We tried it twice, with our friends, Rebecca and Alan Lickiss.  In the form we did it, we got the kids out of our house (and into theirs, with a trusted sitter – hi Charles!) Then we set up writing areas for each of us in our house.  And then we wrote from mid-Friday to mid-Sunday.  When taking breaks, for coffee or water or something, we tossed whatever we’d finished so far on the larger coffee table.  Other people could add, or sit down and read, because late on Sunday there was a critique session before they went home.

I think the lowest wordage for those weekends was 15k words.  The highest was 40k.  And since we inevitably went out to eat on Saturday night and took a bit of time, plus there were talks in the kitchen late at night, it wasn’t bad at all.

We could never replicate it on our own, not even when we had an internet one.  There is something about more than one writer in a house, concentrating only on writing, at the same time, and doing nothing else, with no distractions.

It’s better than one writer in one place, concentrating only on writing, even.

Some of you, who have had occasion to call me or email me, know that I do this sometimes, when criminally late – I find a hotel with really cheap rates and hole up for a week or so and just write like a demon.  It works.  I mean, it’s better than being at home with the kids, the cats and the telephone.  (Better in the sense of my writing more.  I rather enjoy the kids and the cats.)
But it is not the same as having a group, all pulling at the same time, in a small space.  This is why if I could and had other writers in the city I could do this with, I’d rent a communal office to do it in.  I think the same synergy would develop.

Nanowrimo of course is not the same synergy, or not quite.  There’s also the fact that if you are connecting through the Nanowrimo site, you end up talking more than you write.  Some people there, I swear, live to talk.  Which is why I don’t do official Nano site anymore.  BUT Nanowrimo connecting with a small group who reports in, really seems to help.

Still not the same.  We also tried to do writing weekends where we connected via the net and it didn’t seem to raise the same feel.  Real life still intrudes.  So 60k words in a month are okay, but 40k in 48 hours are beyond us.

However, we found out by accident, on the weekend of a con when both of us had stories due for an antho, that the same synergy develops when Dan and I go away Friday through Sunday alone and both of us write.  It’s actually romantic, because (around the con) we got a couple of meals out alone in.  But even with those and the con panels, we wrote as much as we did at those long-ago writing retreats.

Since I found this out, I’ve had this dream where we get to do that about once a month and I get ahead of my schedule.  The problem is that it’s never been possible.  When I first wanted to do that, we’d just moved to this house and were paying on both houses, so I thought “when the house sells we’ll start doing it.”

When the house sold, there were a few other emergencies, and now there are college tuition costs.

So, I’m thinking…  If the donation button on this site raises only enough to pay for a weekend for us (two nights) away at a hotel per month (we’re cheap dates.  No, not as cheap as the hotel we first stayed in for Liberty last year, before moving to the con hotel.  I don’t like worrying about rats) it will have conferred an incredible boon on us.

See, it’s always been for writers that the more you wrote the more you made.  But under the new model that’s much more so.  Instead of fifty percent of your stuff being published (and the rest often waiting years, not on quality – I sold some of it years later, and at least one story that took me eight years to sell was a year’s best fantasy and horror honorable mention – but on “it doesn’t fit our needs” or rather it didn’t fit what they were looking for [I never managed to sell any of my future history short stories, set in the same timeline as Darkships because ‘your future history is not logical’ – ah!]  And I have all these series started: the musketeers mysteries, the refinishing mysteries, orphan kittens, the Shifters, Darkships and the rest of the future history stuff.  I have fans waiting for each of those, and, of course, I can only write a book at a time.  But if I get that weekend away I’ll do them faster.  And weirdly I always come back from that type of experience felling energized (Yes, I’m broken.  Deal.)

At any rate, I think the button has done that this month, for which I thank you more than I can say (though we might postpone the onset of these till January because November is a holiday and two birthdays in this household, and then we hit the holiday season.  Or maybe not.  It occurs to me that a weekend of writing is a wonderful birthday present for self.)

Hopefully it will continue and be one of those self-feeding things: the more I write, the more I can afford to give away on the site as a loss leader, the more donations I get, which make me write more/faster, which means more properties I can either write-in-public or give away under the free short story tab (story changes every week.)

So, again, thank you to everyone who has hit that button.  It will be used to promote writing (so I don’t need to steal the kitty kibble money) more and faster and hopefully better.

Meanwhile, it’s time I got out of here and went to officeish.  I have two novels to finish.

My friend Dave Freer posted on Monday about writing what sells… for the new market.  As so often happens, we were in a similar place mentally.

Monday morning in the shower (yes, I think in the shower, deal) I found myself thinking about how we don’t know what sells.

Now, we might know what has literary merit, but literary merit is a matter of opinion.  I read someone today talking about how Harry Potter is totally devoid of it, which it very well might be, but compared to what?  The comparisons this person pulled up were Dickens and Tolstoi.  Dickens wrote by the frigging word, so what principle of literary value are we applying?  And as for Tolstoi, I treasured his work and kept it by my bedside for years.  You see, I suffer from insomnia and I could never go more than fifteen pages without falling asleep.  So, I’m willing to concede it’s very important to the history of literature.  At least I hope so, or I’d hate to think of all the trees that were killed to print it.  Just don’t make me read it.

Frankly, though I gag at the idea that Harry Potter is the most inventive piece of fantasy evah – it’s rather like Enid Blyton boarding school mysteries with magic – I gag even more at the idea of people putting it down because it doesn’t “illuminate the human condition.”  I don’t know about you but when I want to illuminate the human condition, I get a flashlight.  (Wait, that’s the human basement.  Never mind.)

Doesn’t matter anyway.  Literary value is a will o’ the wisp and has been used for centuries by those-who-know-better to tell the masses what ’orrible little people they are and what ’orrible ’horrible taste they have.  (Shakespeare.  All that blood.  Ghosts.  Inaccurate history.  Rotted the mind like cheap candy.  A favorite of truculent apprentices and low brows.  Why, he had the violence happen right htere on the stage, while all the well bred people knew the way to do it was to have a messenger come and announce it.  In the more fraught plays, messengers crossed back and forth on the stage, but it was good taste.  Everyone knew that.  As a literature major I’ve had to read those plays.  They’re very illuminating of the human condition.  Like Tolstoi.)

What literary value is not is a predictor of sales, unless you are talking ONLY sales to a small subset of status-insecure people who want to show how intelligent they are.  Now, there are any number of those and there are scam– er… authors who make a living off them, but I am not an artist – I work for a living – and I’d rather sell stuff people genuinely enjoy.

The question is… what is that?

Until recently, if you wanted to be read by the largest number of people, the path was easy.  First, you had to impress the gatekeepers.  Fortunately the gatekeepers were a small clique living mostly in NYC and all attending the same parties and reading the same books or – more likely – watching the same movies.  And they weren’t shy with their opinions, either.  They talked all the time, because you see, living in an echo chamber, they viewed their tastes and opinion as symbols of their status and intelligence.  So, attend one or two conventions, and you could psyche them.

Failing that, there were slews of books, seminars and workshops that taught you how to think the way they did, for the purpose of creating stories they’d love.  Then they’d make sure your book got in all the bookshops, and then, if you were lucky, a miracle occurred and your book appealed to the public also.  But that was secondary because a) first you had to catch your rabbit – or editor – and b) the public selection was limited, and often constrained to the current fad.  So if all editors wanted purple swans, (shud up you.  Actually it’s barely less plausible than things they did want: romantic inoffensive vampires; female detectives who thought only of shoes, etc.) you wrote purple swans and if your purple swan was a little better than average you were gold er… purple… er… the purplest of them all.

Recently, while trying to cut down on the number of dead tree tomes around the house, I went through my how-to-write-shelf and realized most of those books are now useless.  All of them, openly or not, teach you to write the book the gatekeepers will love.  So other than the grammar books and the Swain (which you’ll pry off my cold dead hands) they’re mostly useless.

This was confirmed for me when a writer of far more experience told a group of us to “Put it all out there, even the things you think are bad.  Don’t judge your own stuff.  Writers are horrible judges of their own stuff, and these days we just don’t know what sells.  We don’t know what people want.”

But the thing is, I’m a wussy.  Oh, not in most circumstances, but when it comes to my writing.  I sent stuff out DESPITE my fear it sucked and kept sending in the face of rejections because I’ve got a quitting dysfunction, not because of any self confidence.

I hated having to jump through the hoops of the gatekeeper’s opinions, but at least I could study the books, and know I was getting better, as defined to ‘closer to the goal.’  Now, it’s like… gravity is gone, we’re all floating free and, like Thena, in Darkship Thieves, my internal sense tells me I’m always upside down, no matter how I turn.

And awards are no indication of what is good or what will sell.  SF writers are horrible at judging their peers.  It devolves to either status seeking or personality contest.  And fans are only slightly better because the fan awards usually are voted on by only a subset of fans.  (The Prometheus is perhaps the best predictor of sales, and I say that, not just because I got it, but because I know people who read every winner as a matter of course.  Of course, I run with that set of people, so my opinion is biased.)

And I’ve already disqualified myself from literary merit.  So, what remains?

Funny, but Dave and I both arrived at the same conclusion more or less at the same time.  Go back to the beginning of the field, to the things that caused the explosion.  Many of those are now marred by archaic language and style.  But any person with half a brain can tell the things in the story that appealed to people.  Well, I can tell you some of them that appeal to me: Resourceful and daring heroes; strange lands; bravery; larger than life characters.

Mind you, I don’t know if my tastes are universal.  But I know what I like.  And I’d bet you there’s at least ten thousand people out there who have the same tastes I do.  Probably, more like a hundred thousand.  And although it might take time, the new market place gives me a chance to find most of them – or for them to find me.

The new net of friendships between kindred minds spans the globe, so if I find someone who likes me, and they talk to their like minded friends… well…

Will this make me as rich as Rowling?  Who knows.  Probably not.  Besides, I can’t have everything (where would I put it?  Who would dust it.)

Making a comfortable living writing the stuff I like for people who like it sounds like paradise to me, compared to the last ten years of competition contortionism to fit the square peg into the round hole of expectations.

It’s good enough.  It will do.  And it’s enough to aim for.  (And illuminating the human condition can wait for the flashlight.)

I am going to officishing today, which means I should have written the post last night, instead of which I spent time preparing for Nano wrimo.
So, watch this space.  Something will be posted after work.  Now, whether that will be sane or coherent, it’s something else.

Let’s start with what a subplot is – at least for me.  For other people it might mean different things.  It is one of those things that writers, living by the word, tend to give terms so many different meanings, depending on writer, time of career and sometimes mood, that you can find personal definitions for all of our professional terms: synopsis, outline, concept, subplot, character arc, etc.  (I think this is also a result of a profession where apprenticeships are kind of individual, self-created and depending on either what books the writer finds on his way to learning, or which pro he can gang press into helping him.  It might be true that when the pupil is ready the master appears, but in writing it often seems to be more under the heading of “first find a few masters.  Then pick bits of each teaching that suit you.”)

For me a plot consists of the events that serve the central theme of the book.  Say you’re writing a book about growing mutant chickens (shut up you.  It’s early and I’ve had no caffeine.)  The plot would be buying the eggs, building the incubator, possibly the money aspects of this, where you have to mortgage the farm to buy the eggs and the incubator and then through the try-fail sequence, you worry about you and the mutant cows being thrown out of the farm because the mutant chickens won’t hatch.  Then at the end your mutant chickens hatch, but they fly away (I did say they were mutants, right?) and you think all is lost until the mutant chickens come home to roost.

A subplot would be the farmer’s relationship with his younger brother who thinks they should grow pterodactyls instead and his aged grandmother going off in search of a priest to exorcise the incubator and, on the way, finding her son whom she thought was eaten by mutated sheep as a toddler, living as a prosperous witch doctor in the next village.  This will tie in, of course, with fixing the incubators, but it’s also an entire if smaller and less important plot arc.  (Yes, it’s a weird world.  LIVE with it.  Early.  No caffeine.)

Let me start by saying your novels don’t really need much in the way of a subplot.  Not if they’re going to come in as what might now be a viable length of about sixty to seventy thousand words. For this length the inevitable subplot like the relationship between the characters is enough.  And there is always a relationship between the characters, even if it’s the fact the farmer’s wife thinks mutated sheep are unnatural, not like those nice mutated cows.

Then I can – I think – explain that I don’t think I can write a novel without subplots.  Sometimes even my long short stories develop subplots.  It’s just the way my mind works to complicate things.  (Yes, live with THAT either.  Why not?  I have to.)

Also this explains my… difficult relationship with plotting vs. pantsing.  I can do a detailed outline.  Have in the past, mostly because agents or editors demanded them.

Turns out it might not be the … best thing for someone like me to do.  Why?  Well… take the outline to Heart of Light.  (Please!) When it was done, it was 50 pages, typed, and I listed every incident (I thought) that would happen in the book.  The problem?  I hadn’t listed every incident that would happen in the book.  When a plot gets in motion, my subconscious gets fully engaged.  And when my subconscious gets engaged, it produces subplots like bad chilli produces gas.

So what happens with something like Heart of Light – and btw, to generate an outline THAT complete, I’d needed to take several runs at the outline, over and over again, which took me the best part of six months because I needed to get to know the characters, whence all subplots come  – that is outlined till it’s about a quarter of a novel?  Well… it develops more subplots.  And then you have to weed them back.  Possibly with a machetti.  Or what you end up with is in fact soup.

Now, for the longest time, like when I first got published, I used to plot like that, on paper, anyway, before I wrote the novel.  This is because I didn’t trust my subconscious, which, let me tell you, is a wily and cunning beast (possibly a mutated chicken) to give me subplots that tied in to anything, much less my main plot.  And if I came to the end with a bunch of plots that pointed to nothing at all and could no more figure out how to tie them together than how to give a fish flying lessons, I’d have wasted the six months or so of writing the d*mn book.

So, what did I do?  Oh, I wrote a book three times as long as it needed to be.  (If I was lucky.)  And then I sat down with the scalpel and the sewing needle, and cut it to about 1/3 to 1/5 the length, keeping in only the relevant stuff.

I don’t do it like that anymore.  What changed was the way the field, which was collapsing under me as I broke in, interacted with another of my characteristics: the inability to give up once I start something.  You see, round about 2003 I had to make a choice.  I could admit I’d made a mistake in aiming to be a writer most of my life and working like crazy to get published, because there was no way to make a living from this or (worse) at least no way I personally could make a living from this.  Or I could find a way to make a living from this, including but not limited to, doing the work of four to six writers.

See again how I cannot figure out how to give up on something.  Blame it on parents who emphasized follow through and persistence.  Or blame it on a mind that, when I was seventeen, earned me a certificate saying I was perfectly sane.  (Pauses to let the idea of WHY one would need such a certificate sink in.)  I could give up.  I could also levitate.  Theoretically.  Not that I’m willing to test either theory.

The advantage of becoming several writers at once, is that it taught me to trust my subconscious, because I simply didn’t have the ability to write twelve to twenty novels a year (well, I’ve never tried, to tell the truth.  But at the time, the kids were YOUNG and needed a lot more watching.)  So I had to outline the plot and let the subplots take care of themselves.

For someone of my disposition, this is sort of the equivalent of learning to swim by being thrown into rapids.  (I don’t know how to swim, btw.  It’s hard to write under water, so I was never much interested.)

The first book that I did this with was Draw One In The Dark, and, to my surprise, not only did all the subplots tie in, but they tied in at the right time and in the right way.  And then it happened again, and again, till I’ve had to come to the conclusion that my subconscious knows its business, often better than I do.

So, my current process is I write the general outline, (say ten pages, double spaced) then let the subplots fall in place.  This can be distracting to publishers like Baen who emphasize plot.  I think Toni is getting used to the idea that the outline she gets might sound thin on plot, because I write better novels than I do outlines (I think.)

There are two drawbacks.  In the space operas, this plotting by sudden fits of brilliance (Ah!  I see, so that’s what happened a hundred years back!) has played holy havoc with my future history, which in turn affects other stories in the line.  I’m trying to fix it so I can do a couple of novellas in the Thena Verse, but that’s something else.

The other is that I NEVER KNOW if my subconscious will deliver the goods or not.  Okay, so it has done so for the last fifteen books, but that doesn’t mean a thing.  It could fail me tomorrow!  So I live in a constant state of terror of what lurks in my own mind.  (I really don’t appreciate that low whistle and “so you should, sister.”  Mind your own mind!)

And yet the other is that when I write a novel in public – Witchfinder – people ask me questions and say “I didn’t realize this from the beginning” and I have to say “I hadn’t either.”  Or “I might have had a misleading paragraph in there, because I thought it was so.”  I’d like to point out the truly bizarre thing is that I don’t usually have too many wrong-pointing paragraphs anymore.  Towards the middle of the novel, I’ll make a note saying something like “Make sure on revision that S and G haven’t been doing this that long.”  And I’ll go back, hunting paragraphs that say they’ve done it for five years or whatever.  (There might be one.  Haven’t looked.)  Nine times out of ten, it’s not there.  I.e. the subconscious took care of it, already, even though the conscious had no clue.  Often, towards the end of the novel my desk (roll top) looks like a postit note porcupine with “Go back and make sure” and “Drop a hint that x is y back in chapter three.”  BUT the funny thing is about half of those are already there, somehow.

I wouldn’t dream of writing a novel without ANY outline.  But I also wouldn’t dream of outlining EVERY detail of plot, because then my subconscious will just come up with subplots to the subplots and then… well… 650k word book.  Nicknamed doorstop.  Manuscripts kept in case we ever run out of fuel in the middle of winter.

Is this a sane way to work?  Sure it is.  Brother, I have the certificate.

Is it the most efficient way to work?  I don’t know.  It allowed me to make a living in the most messed up state the field ever got into.

And the lesson to take away?  Find your process and trust it.  Don’t listen to me or to any other pro in “I do it like this and so must you.”  Ignore the plotters who tell you you need graphs, charts, maps, and a step counter.  Ignore the pantsers who tell you that you must stare into the void and leap into it without a parachute.  Do as YOU must.

When the writer is ready, the personal method appears.  Now go hatch your own mutant chickens.

I think all of us came into the business with a mental image of that great camaraderie between writers, particularly writers of sf/f, which seemed perfectly natural.

After all, each of us grew up feeling profoundly weird, just on the writing thing (the only reason I didn’t get pounded for going “oooooh” in an ecstatic way when a story or essay was assigned is that I was twice as large as the other kids in the school – Portugal in the sixties and seventies wasn’t known for tall people – and because, frankly, I was the one people were scared of. [Never without provocation but though this might not be obvious from this blog, I have a TEENY temper.]) but also on the science fiction thing.

So I always figured out that though I was like a squid-headed (Take THAT Margaret Atwood) alien among humans, if I could go into a group of my own kind – which to me always implied being published in the traditional way and having credibility and all – I’d be received like the prodigal daughter and welcomed…

Only, it didn’t work out that way.  To some extent, I think it did in the days of pulps – note, I said to some extent – and after that too, at least in groups.  Yes, SF/F is known for the kind of epic feuds where people don’t speak to other people for years “because of what he said at the WF banquet in 1976!” but that in itself is almost heart warming.  All big families have these riffs, and come on, it’s not any different than having a big feud over “what they said about our Maudie.”

But by the time I entered – and, again, I was gratified by noting that Kris Rusch has identified the time I came in as well into the “crazy years” of publishing.  I mean, the poison of misapplied statistics “numbers” started almost ten years before I broke in – it had devolved into something bizarre.

It was – I’ve been reading a lot about the Soviet Satellites during Soviet rule (Well, there is a reason, relating to the next novel I post here in installments – at least if the gamble on this one pays off in both contributions and advance word of mouth for the piece, the second being more important than the first) – a lot like the terror regimens that always seem to follow the French/Soviet style of revolution.

It makes sense in a way, because it’s what happens when things start going disastrously wrong on a society with utopian aims, (and most people involved in publishing are academic-utopians of a form or another) and it crashes head first into human nature in an undeniable way.  Then the idea that human nature must be suppressed, worked upon and elevated becomes the value, since you’re not going to achieve nirvana anyway.

And publishing was running bad when I came in, in the same way early utopian revolutions run bad.  Yeah, you have your great slogans, but the money is running dry.  So, of course, the people at the top decided that what they should do was pick winners and losers, since, meh, the numbers the way they were being used were rife for manipulation.

This is much like a tyrannical regimen picking winners and losers, particularly when you consider that most of those picks were “for agreeing with the editor” though editor-politics are often odd, as they’re often single-issuers.  (Unfortunately for most of those editors the single issue is misandry, in which I cannot concur.  In fact I can’t even pretend and still look at myself in mirror every morning.)

Of course, editors and publishers couldn’t have you killed and all your wealth confiscated, but they could block you from publishing, which for a lot of writers is worse than death, and make sure no one saw your books, ever.

And while some of the books that made it to the top were good, no one who saw how the sausage factory worked on the other side, can have the slightest belief that these workings are in fact even vaguely “fair” or that traditional publishing is in any way a meritocracy.

In fact it was more like a “Meritrocracy” in which we meretriciously tried to ingratiate ourselves with the powers at the top, who could make or break our career even while resenting their power and often insane decisions.  Because we couldn’t do anything about them, we often turned on each other, both as a way of competition and because we had to take it out on SOMEONE.

The field has always run on gossip, but now it was gossip on steroids.  I know there are several people in the field who plain won’t talk to me, and I have to assume it’s because someone told them I said or did something about their Maudie, and I have no CLUE what.  (In the same way that some people, as I came into the field went out of their way to attack me, even though I was in no way in their way and could in no way affect them.)  This kind of crazy-making and paranoia leads to spying, friend telling on friend and the opposite of fellowship and camaraderie.  You were jokeying for position in the field, always afraid that having friends in the band that editors didn’t like would make you one of the d*med.  Yes, people dropped friends because the friends were not in good odor with publishers.  Yes, people had massive fights because they SUSPECTED (on the flimsiest evidence) other writers of messing up their relationship with a publisher.  And that was among beginners and midlisters.  I have enough bestselling friends to know that at their level, behind a facade of comity, it could get WAY worse.  And yes, we all engaged to some extent in double think.

Look, I used to think that was my experience.  That I was the only one who felt cut-off, paranoid (always a tendency for me) and engaging in double think so I didn’t throttle the living day light out of people whose power over and indifference to my career drove me batty.

Turns out, as the gates are inching open, no.  Not so much so.

And though it’s very early days yet, as the possibility of having a career without jumping through crazy-making hoops, is starting to dawn, I’m starting to see relations between writers change.  Instead of the insane competition and trying to avoid being near those who are slated for career-death, we’re starting to cooperate in small ways and go “Hey, you know, if you use this editor, he’s cheap and good” or “hey, this program works better for the conversions” or even “Would you give me a blurb for my indie book?”  And we’re starting to relax a little around each other and admit that yeah, our real anger is at the publishers – all of us, even the ones who are doing well, know someone who was screwed over for no rational reason – not at each other.

Of course, up from that – and a while from that, I suspect – there will be a time when the publishers too see that there is a gate out of the way the system has entrapped them, because they too had to do things in a way they’d rather not, because of distributors, mega chain bookstores, etc.

What’s really heart warming and startling is seeing writers of different political stripes collaborate in trying to figure out the new model.  I’d always assumed crazy politics were a part of my field, but maybe it’s more that because the publishers and editors cared we had to, also.  Heaven knows in other professions people are friends across political lines.  But we were in mode “must not be seen with x or will be sent to publishing gulag.”

I’m not saying that traditional publishers will ever completely reform (or that all writers will become buddy-buddy).  But I think it will become more of a meritocracy in competing with a more open system.  And that’s enough (most of us can at least stop the gladiatorial combat.)  Oh, okay, when dictatorial regimes fall anarchy follows for a while, but afterwards there is at least the chance of “Something better hereafter.”

And we’re living right at the cusp of it.  We few, we happy few, we band of writers…

I don’t know why people are so surprised I write Austen fan fic.  And there are ALWAYS surprised people in the audience when I say that.  It can’t be they’re surprised that I decided to rape Austen.  After raping Shakespeare and Dumas, surely they don’t think Austen would be safe from me?  (Perhaps they think I would have respect for her maidenly status?  Who knows?)  So it must be shock there is such a thing as Jane Austen fan fiction.  Mind you, there shouldn’t be.  Most of it is based on the A & E mini series.  With me, well, books were to me what movies are to the readers today, so, bah, of course I rape it.  You should count yourself lucky I don’t do slash Austen fanfic.  (Actually I wrote one slash story, once, not in Austen, and in one fandom I won’t admit to.  It was done to see if I could.  I could.  You will never know where.  Mwah ah ah ah ah ah.  Which is good, as I could write it but I couldn’t read it.  It’s ick.)

Anyway, today I woke up feeling like living-dead crud.  For one, I normally have trouble staying in bed past six am, and today I slept till nine thirty.  For another, I feel like what I should do is go back to bed and sleep the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I have too much to do, both house and writing.  This is what being the mommy is.  One girds one loins (as opposing to girddling them, which is what I used to say as a newcomer to the US) and one goes on.  That’s life.  But that means I DO NOT post the how-to-write subplots thread I wanted to do (figured out what bothered me about Gabriel’s mother, btw.  Hint, there’s a reason he looks so much like Seraphim. :)  No, no, not telling till chapt… nine or ten, when that scene hits.  And NO she’s not the dowager duchess.  Or her sister.)  If I did, it would come out all muddled.  Instead, I’m going to expose you to my Austen Lunacy in its full glory.  This is the story currently unfinished (maybe by posting here, I’ll get myself to finish, if I do one chater at a time,) over at the dwiggies site and what my austen fan-fans call Elf Prince Darcy.  Those of you who are literature purists may leave the room now.  You have my blessing.  The rubber neckers who want to watch the rape, look on:

Between The Night 

And The Morrow

“They’re trooping at Netherfield again,” Mrs. Bennet told her esteemed spouse over breakfast one fine Spring morning.

Mr. Bennet, engrossed in the perusal of the – only one day late – London news looked over the corner of his paper, an amused expression on his face. “Who are they my dear?” he asked. “I do not have the pleasure of understanding you.”

“Why, the Good Neighbors . Everyone knows that they used to haunt the mound in Netherfield Park.”

The paper rustled. “You must indulge my ignorance, but who is everyone? And who are these Good Neighbors? I would say all our neighbors are good.”

For just a moment, Mrs. Bennet was speechless, an occasion rare enough that it caused the rest of the table to fall silent and the titter of her youngest daughter, Lydia, seated at the other end, to echo unnaturally loud. Jane, the oldest daughter, and Elizabeth, the second oldest, directed looks of reproach at their sister, and Lydia clasped her hands over her mouth to keep herself silent. The next youngest, Kitty, hid her own laughter behind a cough. And Mary, the middle daughter, looked at them over her glasses, with the puzzled expression of a person awakened from a dream – or in this case from the book, hid on her lap, half-under the table.

“The… Good Neighbors!” Mrs. Bennet finally exploded. “You know. The Fair Folk.”

Before Mr. Bennet could open his mouth to tease his spouse further, Mary interjected, “We are to understand that the local people – prey to the most vile superstition – believe that there are creatures who inhabit old mounds. They call them the Good Neighbors or the Fair Folk to avoid calling them fairies or elves. All nonsense of course. Fordyce’s makes it very clear that no such creatures exist, nor…”

“Thank you Mary,” Mr. Bennet said, in repressive accents. “You have enlightened us all.” Then turning to his wife. “From hence do you have this… fairy tale, Mrs. Bennet?”

“Why my sister Phillips says she saw them with her own eyes, riding their prancing steeds over the dark fields at midnight. All arrayed in cloth like spider-webs, and wearing bells.”

“It seems to me they’d catch their death of chill, if they’re riding in spider-webs in the moonlight. And besides, what was your sister Phillips doing up at that time?”

“Well… I daresay she could not sleep. She has nerves, you know, though I’m sure she doesn’t suffer like I do.”

“No one suffers like you do, my dear, but all the same… How do you know your sister Phillips didn’t dream the whole? And if she didn’t, what should it matter to us if the elves come back to their mound? You said they’ve been there before.”

“But not for a good fifty years Mr. Bennet. As for what it matters, I think it should be obvious. It is very likely, you know, that they’ll kidnap one of our daughters.”

“Is that their purpose, then? In coming to this region? To kidnap one of our daughters?”

“Their purpose! Don’t be ridiculous. But they are likely to see one of them and enchant her, and then how are we to recover her? We shall be ruined. And turned out to starve in the hedgerows.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mr. Bennet said, looking over his paper. “With five daughters to marry and my estate entailed away from the female line, we can’t be choosy, can we? Anything that comes in shape of a son-in-law must be accepted.” He grinned at his daughters, over the paper, “What say you, Lizzy, would you like to marry an elf?”

“Indeed, no, Papa,” his second-oldest daughter, who had a lively sense of humor said, with every semblance of propriety. “Too grand by far for me. And I prefer to take my walks in the daytime.”

“I see,” Mr. Bennet said. “This is what I suggest, Mrs. Bennet. We should send all our daughters – and perhaps you, yourself since you’re as handsome as any of them – walking around the mound in the dark of night. I’ll send a note with you saying the elf can take whichever he pleases and then–”

“Oh, Mr. Bennet,” his spouse interrupted. “I pray you will not tease me so. It is very ill to joke about these subjects. Indeed it is.”

“Mama is right, Papa,” Mary said.

“But why, if you just said it is all superstition?” He rose from the table. “Recommend our sister Phillips not to eat lobster patties before bed, my dear,” he told his spouse. “And you’ll see that the elves vanish altogether.”

“Do you think there are such things as elves, Lizzy?” Jane asked in the bedroom they shared that evening. She was the oldest in the family, a blond beauty with perfectly regular features set in an oval face. In her white linen nightgown, her knees drawn up and her arms around her knees, she looked like an angel.

Her slightly darker sister, Lizzy, whose face was more impish than beautiful, turned back from where she’d been hanging her clothes. “Ah, Jane. You know better than to believe fairytales. You are almost two and twenty, after all.”

“But… Wouldn’t it be lovely…” She trailed off.

“Wouldn’t what be lovely?” Lizzy asked, gently. Jane was a kind soul, determined to go through the world thinking the best of everyone who crossed her path. To casual observers, she might appear superficial or not very smart, but her sister knew that there was a dreaming, romantic nature beneath the smiling face.

“Oh… just to think that there is a world where dowries and connections do not matter – where… where it’s all moonlight and shadows and…”

“I’m sure,” Lizzy said. “That if there were such a world, the dowries and wealth would matter too. It might be fairy gold, but no doubt, we’d need to amass a quantity of it before we could marry an elf of birth and substance. And then,” she said. “Imagine how their nobility and gentry would look down on us. You want to marry a mortal? How shocking.”

“Stop it, Lizzy,” Jane said, giggling. “Do you never take anything seriously?”

“Very little,” Lizzy confessed, rounding on her sister with a smiling face. “Being one of five daughters, with no dowry and no connections, I can choose to go through life crying or laughing. And I dearly love to laugh.” As she spoke, she was opening their window to let in some of the still cool but refreshing spring air.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful, though,” Jane said. “If we were to meet someone who loved us for ourselves?”

“Very wonderful,” Lizzy said. “As in a rare wonder which I don’t expect to see– Oh!”

The oh was rung from her, seemingly all unwilling, erupting with force from her lips.

“What is it?” her sister asked, rising to look over Lizzy’s shoulder.

“Nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing,” Lizzy said recovering. “Just some lights in the little wilderness next to the park, which–” She stopped.

She stopped because under the moonlight, the lights that had been coiling through the little wilderness next to their house – a train of lights, really, a very odd phenomenon – resolved itself into … a group of riders in the moonlight.

There were two ladies and three gentlemen, riding in the silvery glow of the full moon. At the front, mounted on chestnut steeds of a grace and elegance such as Elizabeth had never seen, were two men – one dark and one blond. The dark one looked slightly taller than the other, and rode slightly ahead. As he turned his face to say something to his companion, the moonlight hit his face in full – displaying a straight nose, a square chin, full lips. Something to his expression attracted Lizzy, and she leaned forward, from her window, captivated.

But he never looked at her. He wore antiquated clothing, of the sort that men wore in portraits from a few hundred years ago. Short breeches displayed a length of stocking-encased leg, ending in ankle boots. A doublet outlined broad shoulders and a waist that could not be as small as it looked. On his head was a green cap, with a green feather. His hair, tied back, flowed behind him as he rode. “Oh,” Lizzy said, wondering if she was seeing a ghost. For who else would ride in that strange a costume through the neighborhood at night?

But if she was seeing a ghost, then so was Jane, whose hand clenched on her arm, as the riders below pointed in the direction of Netherfield, turned that way and… vanished into the night.

Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Dreaming. I must be dreaming.”

“Oh no,” Jane said. “We saw them. They were… I’m sure they’re elves.”

“More likely London gentlemen and ladies playing a prank,” Lizzy said.

Jane hesitated, but at last said, “I daresay you’re right. People have such lively senses of humor.”

But later, when they were both in bed, Jane spoke, in the dark, “Lizzy? Did you see the… the blond gentleman? I daresay it was the most pleasant face I’ve ever beheld.”

(For those of you who came looking for the weekly installment of Witchfinder, I posted it yesterday.  You see, I thought it was Friday yesterday.  Stupid time machine is on the blink again.  Page down or click here for chapters five and six — a double posting.)

As a lot of you know, I don’t read my Amazon reviews.  Why don’t I read my Amazon reviews?  Don’t I want to know what readers think?

Yes, I do want to know what readers think.  No, it’s not that I think I’m so wonderful that I can’t take criticism.  I do take criticism from chosen beta readers, in controlled circumstances.  From the public at large and without my knowing their background?  The problem is that I have this unerring ability to take 100 good reviews in stride and then believe the one awful review I get.  It’s a gift.  I have the same issue with comments on snippets, which I suspect sometimes causes me to come across as defensive or cranky.  Because I have a way of obsessing on the stuff someone hated/didn’t get and then proceed to turn the entire book into hamburger by trying to avoid whatever they saw.  Which nine times out of ten no one else saw.

To level with you, the successful author with 20 novels traditionally published and a few more under contract, not counting the indies and experiments, is someone who shows up at cons and occasionally at readings or signings.  The rest of the time I feel much like I did when I first moved into the area where I now live: almost thirty, read a lot, wrote a lot, couldn’t give my stuff away for love or money.  When I’m walking along the streets where I pushed a baby carriage around here twenty years ago, I feel like exactly the same person, and still don’t know if I’ll ever be “good enough” to be a writer.

Negative reviews go into that huge crater of lack of confidence and do nasty things that often end with me blocked for three or four months.

So, I don’t read Amazon reviews.  I pretend they don’t exist.  I can’t afford the silence.

Which is why I was probably the last to know there were comments on A Touch Of Night complaining of homophobia.  I heard about it when several people bragged of defending me (thank you guys, you’re all nuts but I love you.) I’ll confess I haven’t read the comments yet, and don’t intend to, so what I have is at a remove.

However, the “homophobic” comment bothered me.  It bothered me a) because it’s the sort of mud that sticks.  b) because it’s so far from the truth it’s almost insane.  c) because I don’t remember what language I used in that book, and when I’m being period-accurate it can get bad.

The background on the piece – it’s Pride and Prejudice set in the world of the Magical British Empire.  This means it’s Regency England with dragons and other shape shifters and some magic.  Shape shifters are illegal and will get executed on sight if found out.

We wrote it, my friend Sofie Skapski and I, because we wanted to write something together for the Derbyshire Writers Guild website and because at the time we started it looked like my MBE would never sell.  (It took eight years from first proposal to placing it.)  Because we were both very busy writing/posting on it was irregular and it took us years to finish.  Then, years after we finished, I kept running into reviews of it, talking about how they wished someone would edit and bring it out properly.  So, we did, with Naked Reader Press, and it’s selling very well for us (or it was, until we took it free, which it might still be.)  (Yeah, the cover is appalling.  I designed a new one for it yesterday.)

As a minor plot point one of the characters – trying not to do spoilers – a delicately brought up young girl, finds two male characters naked in the rhubarb patch, and thinks they were engaging in a bit of snogging.  She is horribly shocked and thinks it revolting, etc.  (To be honest, she probably would have thought the same were it hetero snogging in the rubharb.  It was the spirit of the time.)  It never occurs to her that they were shifters and had just shifted back to human.

Now, part of this was that I was in the spirit of the times and I wanted to show how scary/shocking/revolting she found the snogging, because I wanted to emphasize that with all that, she still thought it was better and easier to accept than shifting.  Even though she, herself, feels sympathetic to shifters, she has acquired prejudice through her upbringing, which make that idea unthinkable to her.  Beyond the pale.

When I’m in that sort of “building the world through language” mode, I can forget that I’m writing for modern readers.  I understand one of the reviewers objected SPECIFICALLY to homophobic language though because I haven’t read the comments, I don’t know if this means that there’s anything stronger than “unnatural.”

Sigh.

So, is this where I defend myself?  Bah.  No.  It is however where I give some context.

For better or worse, I am not homophobic.  Yes, my religion has opinions on it.  My religion also has opinions on judging others, a prerogative not reserved for mere humans.  I do have any number of gay friends of both genders and, what’s more important because more personal and closer to ME, I have any number of gay characters.

Not on purpose in either case. I pick my friends for their minds, and who they sleep with is a matter of profound and complete indifference, except in the sense of figuring out whom we need to invite for dinner or in the sense of worrying about those of them of any orientation  (you know who you are) who pick boyfriends/girlfriends like saner people play Russian roulette.

The character thing is a little more complex.  Those of you who have followed my blog for a while know that characters are the part of my writing I get for “free.”  I.e. I don’t work on them consciously, and they only work if I leave them alone.  I have colleagues who base characters on people they know.  I have others who build them from blocks, or audition them for parts.  I can’t do that.  The characters are as though they were hired by another department (Subconscious inc. the subcontractor.)  A cranky contractor who will only give me a choice, and if I tamper with it, that’s it, I have to cancel that job.  If I go with it, I end up finding that the characteristics that drove me nuts were the ones I need for the story.

Unfortunately SI has a very aggressive affirmative action policy for gay characters.  I get them all out of proportion with population.  And before you think that “unfortunately” means I have something against gay characters (rolls eyes) no.  I’m just always afraid that they’re not marketable.  This doesn’t seem to be true, btw.  At least even very conservative people don’t seem to be put off by my gay characters.  The fear everyone will hate books with gay characters seems to be an obsession of traditional publishing.  As I said  publishers get in my mind.  It’s a problem.  Not all the bleach in the world can clean up afterwards.

And I hope that traditional publishing is wrong on that, because I find myself in the middle of a novel with a gay main character.  (No, not Witchfinder.  Seraphim is straight, his indifference to Honoria notwithstanding.)  I believe they are indeed wrong.  So far no one has complained about the fact that Ben is the only grown up in the Elise Hyatt books.  Or that Nat, for all his faults, is a true hero in Darkship Thieves.  And I found Billy Blacklock rather endearing in Soul Of Fire, and no one, not even my most conservative readers, have complained about him.  Even though that’s as close as it comes to my having written snogging on screen/page.

The thing is, I don’t write my gay characters as walking agendas.  They come to me and I write them as people.  Some of them are unbearable (Ben’s boyfriend in Dipped, Stripped and Dead) and a lot of them are very decent people.  A few are even heroes, often despite themselves.

And I write the other characters as people too.  Which means they often have the prejudices of their time and place.  More so when I need it to emphasize world building.

Am I suddenly afraid that my gay friends will read the book and find it offensive?  Oh, heck, yes, particularly since I know one of my straight friends sent one of them a copy (Yes, we’re very bad in my group of friends.  No proper apartheid observed by orientation and color and all.)  On hearing it had been sent my first reaction was to be afraid the language (which I don’t remember, so in my head it’s very bad indeed) that the character uses to think of homosexuality will hurt my friend.  Oh, this is not rational on my part.  He’s an intelligent man with a good grasp of history and he’s more likely to be offended by my raping of Austen than by some stray slurs.  On the other hand I know that after a while one can get over sensitized (hey, kids, I went through middle school as a ‘brainy’ girl whose eczema – back then mostly on my face – often made her look hideous.  I know from slurs.  And from oversensitization) and it hurts even when we know it’s not supposed to, particularly when it comes from someone we know is a friend.

I don’t like hurting my friends.  I don’t like hurting people I don’t know, much less people I know and like and much, much less the people I like enough to let into my (largely unprotected) inner circle, where they get to know the insecure newby inside, and not just the multipublished author who shows up at cons.

So, if I were writing it now and had thought of this, would I change what I wrote?  I don’t know.  If I’d known that people would flinch from it, I might have softened the language or put in a contrary thought about how they can’t help it or something.  (Though she obviously thinks they can’t help it from the conversation she misinterprets.  Very forward for her time.)  I will note that though she’s shocked and reacts weirdly, she doesn’t denounce them to the authorities.  I will also note later on she’s very concerned for the feelings of one of them should his supposed lover marry.  As an added explanation, she got her information on homosexuality from stories about the decadence of Rome, which is plausible for the time, and also would be not the best light.

But it never occurred to me that people would take the words/thoughts out of context and be hurt by them.  And I didn’t think of the oversensitization aspect.  If anything, over at the fan group, I got dinged because a) she shouldn’t know what homosexuality was (yeah, raised in the country and all) and b) she wasn’t shocked ENOUGH. (I figured if her father let her read about Greece and Rome she was a tad more broadminded than your normal Regency miss.)

But though I might have “softened” or soft lighted her reaction – and I might have.  Again, I hate hurting people without need or purpose – there is only so much one can do.  She WAS a Regency Miss.  One can’t backward-rewrite history and in fact, in my dipping a toe into reading romance, I’ve found that nothing gets the book thrown across the room so fast as regency characters with shockingly modern attitudes – about women, about orientation, about the poor, etc.  Now, there were more tolerant opinions, for the time, but for the record, even the do-gooders who lived to improve the lot of the children of the poor didn’t train the little ones to be lawyers or doctors, and made sure they worked for their keep, just as they would in a working class house.  To have the character bridle at the idea of having children work makes book take flying lessons.  And the same, I suppose, if a REGENCY character thought “Hey, gay people should be allowed to marry.”  Or the like.

I honestly don’t remember how strong the language I used was.  I presume it wasn’t terrible because neither the fans who answered on the unedited novel, nor the editors called me on it.  (Of course, it’s entirely possible they were immersed in the time period.)  And I doubt I’d soften it much if I went back now.  I certainly can’t/won’t soften the historical attitudes.  It’s important we know how fraught things were back then, because otherwise we start imagining it’s all bunnies and butterflies and everyone always agrees on everything.

On the other hand, might I have softened it by having the character have a wee flash of understanding?  Probably.

But here’s the thing – you never know how people will react to your book.  Some of the controversial things you put in, people never notice.  And then they’ll get offended because your young girl character wore blue and “Studies show that girls don’t like blue.”

What do I do about the “homophobic” charge?  Nothing.  I take a deep breath and trust in my collection of work and, more importantly, in how I live to defend me or not.  I apologize to my friends, if I make them flinch.  Because I LIKE them and don’t like hurting them.  But to the public, at large?  I will not let them in my head any more than I intend to let editors in, ever again.

If I wrote books guaranteed not to offend anyone ever, they wouldn’t even have words.  Or any pictures, either.  Or color.

I write the best I can.  You take me as I am, or you don’t take me at all.  But you don’t get to dictate my thought process or my opinions.  If it ever comes to that, I’ll go and dig ditches for a living.