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This is not a post about writing, but it is a post about reading – or a post about fiction and reality, humanity and myth.

There is a way in which fiction forms our mind.  Shakespeare has, after all, been accused of inventing modern men with modern emotions.  Then, through the immense popularity of is plays, these character types, these ways to react to things… spread.

This is possible, though I don’t think it’s true, which is good because if it were it would make a very bad case against the bard’s legacy.  it is true that before Shakespeare there were fewer plays that were coherently organized around character types and character dilemmas that made sense to the modern man.

But I grew up in Europe.  I was taken to see art from the middle ages and before before I even had an idea of art.  I remember the medieval statues, their proportions all askew.  I don’t presume that Leonardo DaVinci and Michaelangelo invented the modern body and we all grew up to conform to it, and part of the reason I don’t believe it is that the ancients pictured bodies similar to our own.

Now, as with the argument with the Venus of Dusseldorf and whether it was porn or an accurate representation of women during the ice ages, it is possible to say that with Barbarian invasions, malnutrition and colder climate during much of the middle ages, it is entirely possible bodies had a totally different shape.  One does periodically meet a person walking around who looks like one of those medieval statues, just as one does, occasionally, bump into a woman shaped like the Venus of Dusseldorf.

In the same way it is possible that during the middle ages, while trying to survive, the idea of the individual mind and emotions counting for much fell right out of the culture.  (It was never as dominant as in our era anyway.)  Survival and times of scarcity always bring about a tightening of social norms to whatever the society considers “average” or “normal” behavior, sometimes with lethal consequences for the odd.  (One of the reasons it always puzzles me why Odds – people who don’t fit in our society – admire despots and societies of enforced poverty.)

Romeo and Juliet, and certainly Hamlet are not fully comprehensible unless we realize we’re watching the struggle of the individual against the group social obligations which were considered paramount.

But enough of Shakespeare.  As you know – or possibly, fortunate people that you are, don’t – you can say the words “William Shakespeare”, start me talking, provide me with food and water at intervals, and I’ll go on under my own power, with no audience interaction, for a day or two.  (Possibly more if my voice doesn’t give out.)

However, the fact that the very notion of Shakespeare having invented the modern human exists tells you with absolute certainty how much we’re aware of having acquired our notions of how the world should work from fiction, in all its means of delivery.

Fiction serves – or can serve – great purpose.  It can show things that otherwise can’t be seen in human life except in the very slow development of a whole life, clearly and in a minute, and through emotional delivery.  Concepts like deferred gratification or limited altruism (sacrificing for one’s kids) or even the ups and downs of a long marriage.

That is the problem too – It shows us what is slow and mostly internal as immediate and external.  Where fiction gives us odd notions – oh, all but the very “literary” sort, and that, I dare say might inform the minute moments of life, but will not (from what I read) give you a general thesis of existence (unless it is “Kill yourselves, all is lost” – the slightly more elaborate form of “Fly, all is discovered”) is the climax.  (You, the lady in the back row, stop blushing.  I didn’t mean that kind of fiction.)

Terry Pratchett whose works are, in a way, a meta-critique of our fables and stories pokes fun at this in (I think) Men at Arms (I always confuse it with Guards! Guards!) when they’re on the roof top and have a bow and one arrow and are attempting to hit the dragon on the “voonerables.”  The clinching argument is “There’s a million to one chance, so it’s a sure thing.”

Fiction operates on creating cathartic release.  As such, it requires a big climax for big stakes (or arrows) and a reward immediately after.  I try my best (because I have trouble believing it otherwise) to indicate there will be a long slog to set all right after the big climax, while still making it satisfactory to people.  But it’s not easy.  

I’m not criticizing literature (or other fiction) mind.  The other times I’ve written this sort of thing people get al mad and say “what do you want then?” – but I like literature fine the way it is.  I like the big climax and the big payoff precisely because they rarely happen in life.

On the other hand, it is important for the readers to remember that fiction is a representation, not the reality.  In reality, when you take the one in a million chance, there’s a good chance you’ll fail.  And even if you succeed and the dragon is gone, you still have to deal with all the crazy people who brought the dragon over and wanted to crown him king.  (The plot of whichever of the Pratchett books is mentioned above.  The covers I have are so similar I routinely confuse them.)

They’re not going to vanish over night; they’ll get up to ever more interesting stuff; and killing them is just not part of the game because it creates other problems.  (We all know what happens to societies that do that.)

So killing the dragon in real life would never be the all-encompassing solution it is in the Discworld  world (though Pratchett too hints at other issues, of course.)

There is a moment when I’m very ill – I don’t know if it happens to everyone – usually in the middle of the night, when I wake for a moment, and I feel the wellness below the illness.  (Just like when I’m getting sick, I feel the sickness beneath what’s as yet health.)

It doesn’t mean I’m well.  There will be days of feeling terrible still, and impatience with weakness, and sleeping far too much.  But it means I’ve turned the corner and I’m going to get well.

In real life it is somewhat like that, and when we throw fits and demand perfect and stark choices, we’re doing it because we want life to be a fairytale.  We want someone to offer us a choice between death or a bowl of ice cream with extra marshmallows, and we’re going to hold our breath until we get every last sweet mushy marshmallow.  We earned it, we deserve it, and we’re going to enjoy it.

I think this is part of human nature and fiction merely gives us an outlet for it.  In the same way I don’t believe Shakespeare invented modern humans, I don’t believe fiction invented the big climatic choice.  It goes back through our fairytales and legends – far back indeed.

But let’s remember that’s the only place it can be achieved, shall we?  The starkest choice you’ll get in real life is between sure death and less sure death (or whatever other evil you’re trying to avoid.)

So, you can choose between death and a bowl of ice cream that might be cyanide laced.  You can choose between letting illness take its course or feeling that moment of wellness and building on it, and taking great care and eventually after a lot of work, getting well. It won’t be easy.  It won’t be fast.  Recovery is not assured.

I’m an optimist.  I’ll take the chance.  And hey, cyanide tastes like almonds.

*crossposted at Classical Values*

*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.  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  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read 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. *

Between The Dogs And A Hard Place
“Only passing through my Lord,” Gabriel boomed back at the leering sort of voice that taunted him.  “I want nothing of yours, and only what’s mine.”
“What’s yours, I understand, is my crown?”
“No, but only those mortals you keep captive here which are bound to me by blood or affection.”  As he spoke, he continued fighting.  There was to him a sort of nimble lack of concern, a quickness of feet and wrist, as he cut at the Hell Hounds.
Caroline, beside him, tried to match his ability and so busy was she that she didn’t realize for a moment that Akakios hadn’t joined them.  While he could stand, it was obvious his forelegs pained him, and he could do no more than defend himself.
There was a long silence, and then the voice that Caroline couldn’t identify boomed again, but said a word that Caroline couldn’t understand, a word like liquid fire that seemed to scrape the senses as it fell.  Behind her Akakios made a sound of outrage, but to Caroline’s surprise, Gabriel laughed.  His hair had come loose from its binds, and flowed around his head like brambles growing in a wild place.  Somehow it made him look more elf than human, and his laugh was also more elf than human, seeming to hit some places out of her hearing range.
“Kind of you,” Gabriel said.  “But that is no offense.  I might as you say be a human-lover and in thrall of the low magic creatures.  Since I intend to live my life among them, I care not what your opinion might be.  I care only to have my own returned to me.”
“You cannot have them.  I would not demean myself by dealing with such as you.  You only seek to go behind my back and fulfill the prophecy.”
This time it was Gabriel who answered in syllables of liquid fire.  Caroline looked back at Akakios who was very pale and looked unsteady on his feet, but show smiled a little at her expression and said, “Ask not, Lady.  Your brother wouldn’t thank me to translate those words for your ears.”
A snarl made her turn back to the fight, just in time to slice off the head of one of the hounds.
Her victory lasted only seconds.  She was just wondering how come she, not an experienced fighter, had managed to kill one of the dogs, when the corpse on the floor became instantly whole and came at her again.  She backed up.  She now realized no matter how many wounds she inflicted, the dogs would keep coming at them, again and again and again, their number never diminishing.
That was why Akakios had said that no matter what happened, if they left Gabriel alone, then he would die here.  But what would their having jumped in to help do, but increase the time he would survive?  In the end, he must still, per force, die.  There was only one of him, and all told infinite numbers of these re-born dogs.
But then …  “Akakios, you said he would die if we left him alone,” Caroline said, “But what has our joining him ensured, but that we die with him, if a little late.”
“Well may you ask him, Caroline,” Gabriel said.  “The prince is a fool, and has brought you into an untenable position where you will do nothing but die with me.  I do not wish to see you die, and anyway, Seraphim would find a way to raise me from the dead and kill me.”  He slashed forward, suddenly, earning them a little space and kicking the carcasses of dogs far away before they reconstituted and came alive again.  It seemed to Caroline that he had more strength here than on Earth, because these dogs were almost man-sized and he was kicking them easily.  He looked at her, just a glance, his eyes wild.  “It is me they want.  Prince Akakios,” the name was a shout.  “Can you manage, despite your wounds, to do the inverse journey of what you did?  They’ll close in on me when you leave, so you should have to leap a shorter space.”
Akakios replied in the liquid-fire language this time, and Caroline thought it too must be those words that Gabriel wouldn’t want her to know, except that Gabriel’s answer back made it obvious it was something else, “You might not be disloyal, but you are stupid.  I am not your lord nor your sovereign, and dying for me will earn you nothing, and certainly not your prophecy.”
This seemed to shut Akakios up, because he said nothing for a long while.  Fighting as hard as she could and starting to feel not only her arms hurting with holding the sword of power, but her magic sting from the long-drawn-out-power needed to keep the sword going, Caroline wondered if Akakios was considering taking her out of here, and what she would do if he decided to do so.
Part of her wanted to leave.  She was very young.  She had never had a season.  She’d never been allowed at grown up parties, and somewhere at the back of her mind was the idea that eventually, should she escape this, she would like to be married and have children, and perhaps get to travel a little and see the world beyond the isles.  
It had never been a part of her plan to die at fifteen in fairyland, defending her illegitimate brother.
On the other hand, if she left, if she walked away…  She could imagine Seraphim asking her where she’d left Gabriel and what was the last thing that had happened to him.  She could see the pain in Seraphim’s eyes when she told him, and she knew she would carry the same pain with her her whole life.  Gabriel might never have been acknowledged as their brother, but he’d been one of them and her friend her whole life.
And then there was the other side of it – that Seraphim would forgive her easily.  After all, she was just a woman.  No one expected of her gallant acts of self-defense, much less in defense of others.  It was logical, because she was weak and she was young, and yet the idea infuriated her.  She wanted to be able to protect Gabriel, who had so often protected her.
She’d just set her chin and decided that dying here was less painful than living a life considering herself forsworn, when Akakios tugged on her cloak.  “Give me your cloak, Lady, do.”
“My cloak?” Caroline asked, mid sword-swipe, wondering if the centaur had lost his mind.  “What are you going to do with my cloak?”
“I cannot explain,” he said.  “Just give it to me.  I promise not to harm it unduly.”
“Do with it as you will,” she said, without turning, loosening from her throat the pin that had held the cloak.  She felt it fall from her shoulders and thought that it must be some arcane magic, particularly since Gabriel seemed to have antecipated what Akakios would do, and said, sternly, “Prince, this will not help.”
“Perhaps nothing will help, Sire, but we must try.”
There was…  Caroline could not describe it.  There was a sound that wasn’t a sound, a whisper that wasn’t a whisper, and a feeling like a small wind behind her, and Akakios let out with a small groan as if of pain.
When she turned back to look at him, he stood by the wall, and at first she thought he had shrunk.  Then she realized the now-familiar Akakios face was atop a… human body, with her cloak wrapped around himself in the way the men of ancient Greece had worn a chiton.  
She barely turned back in time to defend herself from a snarling dog, and would have been wounded, had not Gabriel come to her aid.  “He is a fool,” Gabriel told her, and for the first time looked truly angry.  “He should get you out of here.”
“If he got me out of here, I would not go,” Caroline said, then shouted back.  “Akakios, Prince, what do you intend on doing.  How does this help?”  She felt a little odd about his shape change.  It was all very well for her to have ridden a-centaur back.  Centaurs were a different species and no one could consider them marriage prospects.  But now he was, to all eyes, a man like all others. And she’d ridden upon his back.
She could almost hear Seraphim tell her this was no time to be missish, and Gabriel would probably say it too, if he thought of it, but she could not banish it from her mind, even as Akakios said, “My other form, lady, doesn’t climb too well.  Or jump like this very easilly”
And then she realized the wall behind her ended just far enough above for even Gabriel not to be able to reach up there.  And she couldn’t fully see Akakios leap, but he must have used magic to assist himself, because he’d jumped up and was holding to the top of the wall with his hands, then scrambling up with his feet.  Before Caroline could fully get her breath, he was leaning down, almost from the waist down and extending her both hands.  “Lady!” he said.  She got what he meant to do, and reached up.  He grabbed around her wrists and pulled her up, with minimal assist of her feet scrambling up the wall.
When he hauled her all the way up, she threw herself, face first, onto a path that seemed to be fine white sand and run at the top of the wall, all the way up, like a widow’s walk atop a fortification.  Akakios feet were twined around a marker on the other side of the path in a way that must hurt his injured legs, but he didn’t complain.
She didn’t need Akakios prodding.  She immitated him, then both of them leaned down.
“Sire,” Akakios called down to Gabriel, now with his back against the wall again.  “My Lord.  Your sister can keep you safe a little while, if you give us your hands.”
And Caroline realized what he meant, and bent her mind to stop the dogs.  It took longer, this time, and was harder, but her mind was clearer if not stronger than that of the king of Fairyland.  For a moment, the dogs stopped, as though frozen in their tracks.
Gabriel didn’t argue.  He must be very tired indeed, Caroline thought.  Instead, he turned around and while she and Akakios each held one of his arms with both hands, he scrambled up the wall with his feet.
He fell half atop of them, heavy, panting hard, then rolled off and lay on the path, still panting hard.  “You are both idiots,” were the first words he said.
“You’re welcome, I’m sure, Mr. Penn,” Caroline said with a sniff.  Gabriel took this cutting remark with a sudden and explosive laugh and sat up.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t grateful to you two idiots.  Do you have any idea where you landed us?”
Akakios had sat up, also, and was rubbing at his ankles, which were bleeding from what seemed like giant dog bites.  “I expect on the path to the king’s castle,” he said.  “I will not shift if it’s the same to you and if I can continue borrowing the cloak, Lady.  The wounds are bigger as human, but they are of less consequence, and this is no path for a horse’s hooves.”
Caroline looked up and saw that they were in fact on the proverbial path that spiraled up the proverbial white mountain, to the proverbial fairytale castle, which flew with pennants and flags.  For a moment, it was so beautiful, it took her breath away.  Then she remembered the voice of the king of fairyland and shivered.
Gabriel, stretched, reached over, and touched Akakios’s ankles.  The wounds retracted, closed.  In seconds there were only scars.
Akakios took a deep breath.  “The king’s touch.”
“Or just very good elven power,” Gabriel said.  “Don’t go saying stupid things, or we can’t be friends anymore.  I wonder why my ever-loving uncle dropped me outside this particular wall.”
“He couldn’t help it.  It’s the prophecy.”
“Talking about the prophecy will also mean we can’t be friends anymore,” Gabriel said.  “We could walk the other way, but my guess is the dogs will be waiting for us as soon as they can reach us.  Also, I have a strong feeling Michael is kept up there,” he pointed towards the castle.
“Then we’ll go there,” Caroline said, and thought how long it would take on this weary road.  But at least there were no dogs.  A nagging feeling told her there might well be something worse, but she ignored it.
“We will indeed,” Gabriel said, standing up, and extending a hand to her.  “And we might yet wish ourselves back with the dogs.”

I did print out the rest of the book, but haven’t gone over it, yet, so discontinuities still not fixed.  The younger boy started classes at college yesterday, so as you imagine the week was consumed in what I call “Freshman follies” including the visits to counseling that they want him to make for reasons only they know.  Turned out he had all his ducks in a row, but I guess most freshmen don’t, because the school insists on checking.

Anyway, other experiences this week (not to do with Baen except that they inconvenienced Baen as well as myself in one occasion) has me wondering with Kris Rusch and Cory Doctorow “Has all of traditional publishing done insane?”  (Baen as usual excepted.)  I thought you guys might want to head over to Kris’ blog and read this.  Also, Amanda Green covered same topic at Mad Genius Club this week.

More than anything, we writers are bringers of order and coherence to the world

I know, I know, you’ve met writers before.  Or if you haven’t, you’ve hung around this blog long enough to get the impression of a woman who is a nervibore – mostly she lives off her nerves – and whose life can become a crisis at the drop of a hat.

So you’re looking at that title and thinking “order”?

Yeah.  Because what we do is not what we are.

At any rate, my friend Dave Freer was right in his Monday blog at MGC.  Writing qua storytelling is a total activity.  It resembles a nine to five job less than it resembles a spiritual (or physical) practice.  Given half a chance, and sometimes even without being given any chance at all, it takes over your life before you even notice it.

I remember when I read one of the very first – if not the first – book on how to write SF/F – by Orson Scott Card.  He said something along the lines that one should tell a hoplessly untalented writer to get out of the field, before it ruined “his life, his family, his marriage, his career.”

I disagree with Mr. Card on the idea that one can tell who is “talented” from who is “untalented.”  The most naturally talented people I know, one has failed to finish his book, the other has rewritten the same book ever since I met her 18 years ago.  And I’ve known total hopeless hacks to suddenly, over night, get their ducks in a row and produce not just saleable but good prose.  Mostly it takes a lot of work, a minimum of rationality and wanting to do it (which my friend who hasn’t finished is book is lacking.  He can take it or leave it, so he left it.)

More importantly, I never fully understood whether he thought that being successful in writing (or what passes for successful these days) would prevent destroying your life, your other career or your marriage.

Yes, okay, I’m married and very happy, but part of this is that my husband is a very patient man – particularly since when he married me he had no idea I shared my head with an assorted cast of characters.  It’s like thinking you’re marrying a woman and instead running away with a circus, a cast of thousands, and three trained elephants – and the other part is that our life is not QUITE absolutely normal.  For instance, there are these “GIY” (get it yourself) dinners, where the kids come over and go “Is it guy?” and I nod and keep on typing.  A few years ago it was only the younger throwing a fit on being tired of eating boiled eggs (the only thing he knew how to make) that made me realize I hadn’t cooked for two weeks.

Writing is insidious. It not only pushes all other activities out of the way, given a chance, it pushes most of your thoughts away too.  So you emerge at the end of a book and suddenly realize your library book is three weeks overdue, there’s a pile of contracts you forgot to sign and OMG, weren’t you supposed to go to the doctor last week.

This sort of creates a roller coaster of chaos in the writer’s life.  Things that a normal mother, wife or housewife would do every day and gradually, get deferred until they explode (loudly) in my face.  I’ll think something isn’t due yet because I did it two weeks ago… and it will be six months or a year.  I start projects like gardening and idea hits and I leave it half finished.  Then forget it ever existed.

This is probably why every writer I know, even those who manage to be happily married and have semi-well-adjusted children, is always dealing with something or other, usually postponed health checkups or dental work.

But this appearance of chaos and disorder is deceptive.  Beneath it all we’re working in stories, and stories are order.  More, stories bring order into the world.

Given a number of disparate events, writers – or storytellers, in this case, since we could narrate the story orally – can’t help but make a coherent story.  A dog on the road; a ballerina with tattered clothes; a worn shoe in front of a fence – any of these and we make a story and even a “moral” explanation – in the sense of a satisfactory cause and effect – behind it.

The dog is on the road and dodging cars because she escaped a cruel master who mistreated her.  The ballerina wears tattered clothes because she doesn’t care for material things, but only for her art.  The worn shoe in front of the fence was left there by peg-legged man who…

The difficult part is not for me to make up a story – the difficult part is for me to prevent myself from making up a story.  To the extent the human brain is a machine for bringing order out of chaos and creating a satisfactory chain out of random events, the writer’s brian is a well-honed machine for doing so.

It used to be, when mom sent me to get something in the store, that I had to consciously not link people I saw on the street, or odd neighbors talking to each other, or something out of place.  Sometimes I couldn’t resist, and told the story to mom as if it were all linked (and it’s amazing the number of times it really was.)  But in real life, I have to keep reminding myself that I can make as many stories as you like, but you shouldn’t BELIEVE them.

If you’re sitting at a diner counter and the person next to you is saying something like “they found everything but the head.  They’ll never find that.  I know what I did with it, but I’m not telling anyone” – did you just sit next to a murderer?  Or was he talking about a recording device part, or a hundred of other things called a “head?”  Heck, even the page has a head.  (Presumably you didn’t sit next to someone who hid a whole bathroom, though you might have.)

But so long as you don’t mistake truth and imagination for each other, you can and will make stories.  And you might even be sure they’re true.  But if you find an add in the local craigslist for a “Clever Girl” Velociraptor you might “know” it is a code between thieves, but you shouldn’t call the police on that basis.

The thing is, our writers have the same sort of mind, only they’re not always – or they’re not most of the time – as good at making up the chain of order and sequence as we are.  But we’ll still love books that start with a seemingly random event that suddenly becomes far more significant.

In one of my favorite scenes of They Walked Like Men as they’re driving along, they see behind them a car with only one headlight… and then they realize the headlight is in the middle, which is when they know the car isn’t real.

The truth is driving a rural road, you might come across stuff like that (and we have) and it’s just someone whose truck headlights quit, and they hung a lantern in front to drive the five miles or so to get the truck home.

But I could see Clifford Simak in that position and thinking “Um… what if it were aliens pretending to be a car?”  And that is somehow more satisfactory because a truck with a lantern hanging mid-hood is just crazy, while aliens pretending to be a car makes sense, makes a pattern and can be a story.

In turn, humans are the stories they tell themselves. If you go far back enough in time, you find plots that are either unorganized and things seem to happen at random or as the result of the gods whim or some other device that seems to obey only the promptings of a restless subconscious.

Then, they slowly acquire organization and a sense that things happened for a reason.  And then readers (or listeners) integrate this into their lives.  And this makes it easier, in turn, for humanity to organize, particularly when the idea of what causes what effect becomes more or less universal.

Stories mold our minds, our relationships, our societies.  All because some story teller couldn’t hear a random phrase like “And then I found out they were aliens” and think “Oh, yeah, foreigners” but instead looks over the very normal girl who said it and thinks “She met aliens?  How did she escape?”

Oh, we’re imagination too, but most of all we’re bringers of order, of rationality, of sense into the world.

Now excuse me while I go get the cat out of the bookcase and tell the kids arguing in the hall to shut up.  There’s a story that needs my brain as an engine of order for the world.

Hey, buddy, want to buy a plot?  I got it cheap down at the corner, but it’s really good.  Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy recovers girl again.

When I was a beginner writer knee high to a pot of ink, I was obsessed with plots.  The reason was much the same that teen boys are obsessed with girls: They’ve never been close enough to one to grab her properly and aren’t even sure which bits they’re supposed to grab.  Besides everyone says they’re supposed to have one, but no one says how.

In my case, it was worse than that – everyone kept saying that I needed to learn to plot or that my stories needed more plot. They were wrong.  My stories had plenty of plot – what they lacked was even a hint of foreshadowing and occasionally more than a hand waved at explaining motive.  Being a child of the seventies I thought everything was supposed to be SURPRISE! And also so deeply buried, psychologically that no one fully got it, so it was “deep.”

Of course, I also had no clue of the foreshadowing, or that I was supposed to do it, until Dave Freer rubbed my nose in it, after I’d published my first three books. So the editors stand excused(ish.)

But because I had no more notion than they did what plot actually was, I obsessively bought books on stuff like “the twenty plots” and “ten basic plots” and…

Ignore that – this is not about plots or how to plot per-se, but something totally different – how to steal the spark of the gods, if you wish.  It’s as close to rational explanation as I can come.

The problem (or the joy) of stealing plots as such is that no one will ever know.  If it’s not obvious both from the opening and from the titles of the books on plotting, plots can variously be boiled down to twenty essential ones, or ten essential ones, or three essential ones, or whatever.  The key is in the “boiled down.”  You boil humans down enough, and we’re all skeletons that rather resemble each other.  (Note, this blog is neither endorsing nor condoning such activity.  It is, at the very least, improper disposal of human remains. In Other Words, Children, don’t try this at home!)  In ultimate instance all plots are one “creature with problem solves it/not.”

So go ahead steal that plot.  If you’re going that route steal good and old and be aware tons of people have done it before you.  Shakespeare has been ripped off more ways than Uncle Scrooge’s money bin in the Disney comics.  So have the Iliad and the Odyssey and pretty much every fairytale known to man.  However, these port within genre (except Shakespeare) by and large, to Science Fiction and fantasy.

What I’m talking about is something quite different.  I was recently converted – as you know – to Regency Romances.  Some of them are even on the “good book” category.  Most are in the “popcorn” category… ie. I can’t get enough of them because I half-read half-skim and don’t remember them afterwards.

I swear half the regency romances I read are ripoffs of Heyer.  And not at the level that I appear to have ripped off Heinlein, to an extent, for space opera.  Not at the level of “I grew up reading this and read it so many times there will be a similarity of words, of phrases, of ways things are justified.  I internalized that stuff, and it’s now in fact part of me.  No, these ripoffs of Heyer are, if not conscious, then ripped off from someone who CONSCIOUSLY ripped her off.  

The problem with doing this is that while it’s not plagiarism – you can write a story about a young girl kept in the country in ignorance of her circumstances, and the rake who wakes up her womanhood without really stealing anything.  You can even add an indifferent older brother or a lame younger brother without problems. – the story is still close enough that you know where they got it, at least if you’ve read Heyer.  The further problem is that NONE OF THEM – not one of the idiots – writes anything even approaching Heyer.

I like Heyer well enough that given the paucity of her books (she wasn’t immortal and couldn’t write forever) I’d welcome something I’d call “good fanfic” – stories that are close enough in spirit to hers, but twisted another way or spun differently.  The stories she would write if she were this person.  And there’s a lot of variety to that sort of thing.  The Austen fanboard I belong to (though these days time rarely allows me to go there) has at least 90% of its content be variations on Pride and Prejudice.  But they’re still interesting enough or different enough you read them.

Most of the Heyer imitations aren’t.  Some are okay.  While it still has most of the same bones of the original story, it spins differently so fast that you don’t mind it.  Some are honest fanfic and have the “If this crucial point had been different change” and that’s okay.

They still all fail when the book they’re ripping off is one of my favorites.  It is a mistake to invoke Sylvester or Frederica or Venetia “Now with explicit sex” – You’re not Heyer, you’re not close to Heyer, and to imitate her close enough for me to recognize the book only sets the standard I now expect.  And you’ll fail.

However, since I read everything, I’ve come to realize that you can do this between genres with great success.  Say you read both science fiction and mystery, and you start reading something and feel that “spark” there somewhere, like a sudden excitement.  And you decide to steal the fire of the gods.

This works because you HAVE to change it.  Yes, sometimes you can do it minimally.  Say, the Maltese Falcon with aliens – and in that case, you’d best own up, because everyone will know.  But say you want to do science fiction Nero Wolfe.  Well, first you move them from New York City.  Then you make Nero a super intelligent something – robot? Bio-improved?  Alien? – and Archie a different species.  No orchids, so what does he grow?  And then there Fritz – what is he?  Mechanic?  A bio-engineer?

By the time you’re done, you could steal Fer de Lance and no one will ever know.  No, I don’t intend on doing this.  I love the book as a reader, but it doesn’t feed the WRITER spark.   

And that’s part of it – that tingle, that spark is not even often fed by a GOOD novel.  At least in my case, half the time, it’s likely to be pushed forward by something someone botched badly.  They start with an interesting character, then it goes down hill fast.  And as far as I steal the spark, these days, it’s usually a scene which gives me another and sets me up for a whole book.  I swear A Few Good Men attacked me when I opened a – turned out so so, but nothing to write home about – book that starts with someone unjustly accused of murder being transported to Australia.  I never read past page 5 – not for a while – because that situation sparked the voice in my head, with Lucius in jail, the break happening and well… what follows.

All this to say, if you’re a writer, you should be aware what’s plagiarism, and what isn’t, and also that no matter how careful you are people will find things in your stories you never put in there.  There was this editor of a now defunct magazine who routinely told me “you ripped this off from a tv plot.”  This was baffling, as when I was sending him stories, I didn’t own a TV, hadn’t even watched any in ten years, and frankly never watched much beyond cartoons and science programs when I was little, and the occasional mystery series since then.

The thing is Pratchett is right in that ideas rain from the sky and into your head, anyway.  (In bed, pull the covers on your head, and pretend that you are dead – the zeitgeist is gonna get you.)  For instance I had this story, written before the series, which not only reads like something out of Stargate, but I call the device to travel between worlds Stargate.  Fortunately I had done with getting it rejected (at that time more than likely unread) when the series came out.  In fact, they were probably written/conceived of at about the same time. (It has been proven tinfoil hats make the condition worse!)

So stuff is going to fall into your head.  There’s no avoiding it.  It’s best to know what you’re doing and where you stand.  And it’s best, of course, to let your sparks come cross-genre.

Stuck?  Don’t be.  Pick up a novel in a genre you normally don’t read.  Or ten novels.  Read them.  Something might ignite the spark of the gods.  Then al you have to do is make it yours.  (And watch out for liver-loving eagles)

Someone in my comments yesterday brought up the whole question of the division between art and craft, and right now – at this very moment – old habitues of the blog are groaning and shaking their heads and saying “Did you have to start THAT again?  Don’t you know what she’s like when she gets wound up?”

But it’s okay – truly – you may crawl out from under the various pieces of furniture.  I’m still just the slightest bit under the weather, so there will be minimal flingage (it is too a word if I say it is!) of fish, and anyway, I want to talk rationally about this.  (You, yes, you, the gentleman with the pug, smirking in front of his screen! – Wipe that smirk  off your face.  I’ve been rational in the past.  Once.  It was a Thursday.  It might have been foggy.)

Is there such a thing as “Art” – as distinguishable from really, really, really, really, really good craft?

Stop looking at me as if I’d lost my mind.  (It’s not true anyway.  I know exactly where I left my mind – University Hospital delivery room, Charlotte, NC, 21 years ago.  I’m sure it’s still there, in the corner. Cowering.)

Seriously.  Is there such a thing as art, distinguishable from superb craft?  If there is, how would you tell?

Well…  If you’re mumbling “I know art when I see it” – I agree with you.  There is… a quality to art.  A touch of something more than human.  Something that shouldn’t/couldn’t be conjured out of mere blood, flesh and bone.

I discovered this when I was dead broke – about a year after leaving my mind behind – in Columbia, SC.  Dan left his job to look after me when I had pre-eclampsia.  Unfortunately the job he took on, which was supposed to let him work from home and pay him, didn’t PAY.  So… by the time Robert was born we were already in trouble.  By the time we gave up on getting paid, we were in MORE trouble.  By the time Dan found a job in South Carolina (I couldn’t work.  Took me forever to recover, besides having an infant) we were in so much trouble it wasn’t even funny.

This led to the first two years of Robert’s life as we paid back a mountain of debt and lived mostly off a gigantic bag of frozen veggies a week and a lot of rice.  (The meat was boiled with the veggies and given to Robert as soon as he could eat.)

It’s hard to explain how broke we were.  We’ve been stone broke since, but never to the point where buying a used paperback meant I skipped the daily meal for a couple of days.  (And yes, I still bought them.  You make your choices, I make mine.)

So, in that time, when life seemed like a sterile relentless slog of “must do” with no fun at all (we didn’t own a TV and this was pre-internet.  And I’d already read every book we owned five times. – G-d, I would have KILLED for Amazon and the free promotional e-books!) – before even we came to Colorado and things eased a very little – I don’t remember how or why, we found ourselves going through a used book store.  (They had a free rack up front.)  I guess Dan thought it was safe to take me to the coffee table books.  See, I had never been a “pretty pictures” kind of girl.

And then I opened a book of DaVinci works.  I can’t explain it.  Those pictures were like balm on my abraded stomped-down soul.  They were beautiful like nothing in our life was beautiful right then (well, except the kid.)  But it was more than that.  Something to those paintings stirred and touched depths I’d have sworn I didn’t have.

It must have shown in my face because Dan said something along the lines of “Screw paying back the bills as fast as possible.  You can and must have this,” and sprang he $40 we realistically could NOT afford to buy the book.  Through the next three years, until bills were paid off and we could breathe and schedule in a little fun, THAT book served as a refuge.  Spending a couple of hours staring at the pictures was like a mini-vacation for my eyes and mind.  (AND should you doubt the world is a better place, if we should find ourselves in the same situation again – and we’ve been close – now, twenty years later, there are art sites I could look at for the price of the net connection which we must have, anyway.)  In similar circumstances I’ve had my mind eased by watching a Shakespeare play (yes, they’re okay read, but that’s one thing I prefer to watch and hear) or by reading a loved book.

There is to art that which touches something you might not have been aware of having.  In books, it absolutely makes you live the story, drags you into it, pours emotion into you, and leaves you in a different place from where you started.

Oh, I found out years later, the same is true of music – and do to an hearing issue I am the world’s worst music-appreciation person.  BUT friends gave us symphony tickets during annus horriblis, when I was killing myself with six novels for which I had NO hope of success, AND homeschooling the child.  That evening surrounded by music (there’s no other way to describe it) was enough to carry me through the next six months, till things got better.

So, yeah, in my opinion, there is art – but how can you tell it from good craft?  What particle of canvas can you boil that will yield “art.”  I know it by its effect on me.  You know it by its effect on you.

And what is the difference between art and craft?  Well… craft, no matter how great doesn’t do that.  Also, art can cover a multitude of thumb prints and ill-mended plot points.  I.e. some things are art even though the craft sucks so badly that the Dyson people have considered integrating it into their vacuum cleaners.  And some things are wonderful, wonderful craft and utterly lifeless and do nothing for you.

What I want you to understand, though, is that this appreciation, this feeling in the soul, this transcendent beauty, is FELT – which means it’s subjective.

I love looking at DaVinci.  Robert, my older son, can be brought to tears by Van Gogh.  I have nothing against Van Gogh.  If you have to admire some post-renaissance artist, he’s a fine one, but I wouldn’t sit transfixed in front of his work for hours.

What is art to you, might be “oh, that’s just really good craft” to me.  Or it might be even “OMG, I couldn’t even read it.”

Here I must make a detour – No, Sarah!  Not you!  You of the clear and linear thought! – and point out that readers often “can’t stand” a book for reasons that writers find bizarre.  No, seriously.  You might write an 800 page opus, and pour into it every ounce of your life experience, every particle of feeling and thought you can imbue it with; you might polish each word till it shines; but someone out there will say “well, I hit that thing on page eight, where she buys a pink Cadillac, and it completely lost me forever.  Sorry.  I just couldn’t empathize with a character who would do that.”  Or your character has freckles.  Or you used the word imbue wrong.  (And it wasn’t even you but some copyeditor who did that, after your final go through, and you never saw it, till it was in print. – No?  It’s happened to me.  Like the one who put t at the end of every thou in a book set in Tudor England.)

The flip side of this is that what will make the book for some readers is something off the cuff that you just let fall.  There will be the conversation your character has with his dog, which you just dropped in because you could, or the fact your character drinks only single malt, and this will send a reader into raptures and make him or her a fan forever.  My assumption is it balances out.

But the fact remains your exquisitely crafted, maybe even artistic book, will never reach everyone, and might not reach people it’s perfect for, because they don’t like your use of hydrogen peroxide in disinfecting small cuts.  (No, seriously.)

And again, I must bring up the point that some of the books my best friends or even my husband think are art and stand outs are books that I can’t read past page three.  Worse, some of the books that shook me to my very core at 17, now read trite, contrived, and I see the wires moving the characters as it were.  Or even worse, books I loved at 30, I now can’t read because, inexplicably, the word cadence has become like nails on the blackboard to me.  (This is reversible, too.  For years there was an author I couldn’t read because his word choice bothered me.  EVERY ONE OF THEM was subtly wrong.  Ten years later, he became one of my absolute favorite writers and remains so another almost twenty years later.  What changed?  My own use of language?  (Well, being ESL, when I first got here, I felt language differently.)  My hormonal balance?  The attention I devote to reading?  Who KNOWS?

Was he art before?  Is he art now?  WHO KNOWS?

Art exists.  Is it universal?  Can you find it?  More, can you know if you are putting art into your work?

This is the part of the blog where Sarah throws her hands up in the air and asks you if you wouldn’t like a nice slice of cake instead.  You’re overwrought.  Thinking too much is bad for you.  It gives you astigmatism and puts hair in your eardrums.  Here – pours you some tea – take a deep breath.

The answer to your question is: Who knows?  Who cares?

If you try to figure out whether you’re a mere craftsman or an artist – worse, if you try to convince your friends some writer you adore is an artist, not a craftsman – you’ll drive yourself, your friends, and possibly total strangers who’ve never done anything to you completely insane.

Look, kid, we don’t know for sure – of course – but there’s a good chance Shakespeare wrote to pay his bills and buy his wife a nice house.  Dumas dang well wrote to pay his bills – with notable lack of success at times.  Heinlein said loud and clear that he wrote to pay his bills.  Rex Stout?  Yep.  Paid his bills.

So, write to pay your bills.  Or at least aim to.  This will keep you honest and keep you from going chasing after your own tail, starting to wear a pony tail, sit in fashionable cafes and hold your demi-tasse just so.  It will certainly keep you from using the excuse that your stuff just doesn’t sell because you’re too good for this terrible world.  And it will keep you grounded.  Also, if you’re not writing art – and you can’t know, and I can’t know.  Someone might know, but you might never meet them – at least your efforts helped support you.

And use all your craft the best you can.  IF the muse stoops down and kisses you, well and good.  Then ages yet unborn will sing of your genius.  And if it doesn’t, chances are you’ll never know.

AIM at competent and exquisitely crafted.  If you surpass that, win.

On the other hand, if you REALLY insist on being “an artist” I have a beret my mom sent me, which is two sizes too small for me (I am blessed with a massive head.  That’s it.  The gentleman who sniggered will stay after school and clean out the erasers.)  You’re welcome to it.  If all you want is to say that you’re an artist and strike a pose that’s easily done.

If not, go work and stop worrying your head about things you can never figure out. Might as well count the angels on the head of a pin or calculate the flight velocity of dragons.

If the muse has kissed you, someone else will feel it.  Stop thinking about it.

Write.

This is the part of the blog when we reclaim words.  The word I want to reclaim here is “hate.”

Look, I hate my hair today — Sunday —  and I hated the way I felt this morning, with a sore throat and headache.  And I hated having to run first thing in the morning, but I did it in the hopes it would set things right which it didn’t.  So, I’ve sat here through all of Sunday, feeling like a lump and hating it.

All of which is utterly wrong.  Hate as I understand it is as absorbing, as all-powerful, as charged an emotion as love.  People throughout history have had loves and hates.  And just as they wished to achieve bliss with/for their loved ones (depending on the type of love) they wished to DESTROY those they hate.

“Peace, I hate the very word, as I hate Hell, all Capulets and Thee” – Montagues and Capulets are all about the unreasoning hatred: strong all consuming, absorbing, and will be led by it inexorably to destroy or be destroyed.

Hate is a great emotion to use in a book, because it’s big, red and pulsing.  (Stop giggling.  Don’t make me come out there.)  It’s an all or nothing sort of emotion.  Of course, if that’s the only emotion you use in your book, it will be a diminished book.  As Agatha Christie said of Elsa Dittisham in Murder In Retrospect (aka Five Little Pigs) if all you know is hate and love, you’re not quite grown up.  Grown up human beings know emotions with more shadings.

I wonder what it means about us as a society that we’re now all “hate” or “love”?  Is it a result of that delayed adulthood that has been referenced here by various commenters?  Or the result of our being, more than any other society in the past, a society permeated by entertainment and story?  It’s not just that on the page emotions must be bigger than they’d be in real life – the same effect applies on screen, where most people experience their story telling and through which most people absorb their idea of how the world and human interaction should be.

I will confess right now that I have an odd relationship with visual entertainment.  I view it only as a palliative to the extreme boredom of a repetitive task that doesn’t engage my visual attention.  Blame it on my parents, who didn’t get a TV till I was 8, or perhaps on a genetic disposition, who knows.  (It’s a war wound, g’venor.  I took an arrow to the knee.)  So I can go for years without watching TV and then, either because some monumental task looms (usually ironing, which can go on for DAYS) or because I’m sick with the flu or something (the type of illness where one doesn’t feel like working but is tired of sleeping) I end up in front of the TV for a week or so, and catch up on years of potential watching (thank you Amazon Prime and Hulu.)

So, I have seen soap operas maybe twice in my life, and the second time shocked me more than the first.  The first time was when I was very new to the US and everything was strange.  The next time was ten years later, while talking to someone who had a soap opera on – and at that time what hit me was how odd the acting was.

I don’t know if any of you have thought of this, but Shakespeare, to feel “right” must be played at a frantic, exaggerated pace.  Then it matches the words and the emotions.  Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but words, gestures and even voice level, Soap Opera makes Shakespeare look as stayed as a whisper while sitting in church.

I suspect, though I haven’t watched soap operas again to check, that some of that acting style has migrated to sitcoms and other shows.  (Of course, I only very occasionally watch those, either, but I seem to remember some joke about the exaggerated expressions of the lead actor in CSI Miami.)

And I suspect, raised on shows, with that acting permeating our consciousness to a level never before experienced in history, we’ve slid the scale right up.

Did I spend the day thinking how much I hated my hair?  Do I experience for my hair one of those emotions that will destroy one or the other of us?

Uh…  No.  I got up in the morning and was disappointed with how limp and odd it looked, and my attempts with a curling iron were fruitless and since I felt blah, I went “whatever.”  That’s the extent of my grand passion for my hair.

As with a lot of things I’d say I hated – beans, I hate… wait.  I might actually hate beans.  I just lack the ability to eradicate them from the world, and I’m aware innocent people would die if they disappeared, since they’re the diet base of various other American countries and I hear an excellent (if repulsive) source of protein. – I don’t actually hate them.  I dislike them.  They pain me.  They annoy me.

I don’t hate being stuck in traffic – it annoys me, though and puts me out of temper.  I didn’t hate the woman ahead of me on a one lane road, putting on her makeup and pressing the brake erratically.  Even if both of us stopped and I got out, I wouldn’t want to fight her to the death.  I might scream impolite things at her and tell her to stop being an idiot, but I never even got close enough to anger to want to slap her, much less kill her.  And once I was out from behind her (every single day on my way out of Manitou to drop the kids of at the school in Colorado Springs, the last year we lived in Manitou, why?) I didn’t think about her the rest of the day.  And now, ten years later, I remember her idiocy, but not her name, or even the color of her hair.  I don’t wish her ill.  I just wish someone would have taken her mascara wand away.

Are there things and people I hate?  I’m not sure.  Those people and things that put my family in danger, I dislike very intensely, but I don’t think I want to destroy them, just to stop them doing what they do.  Yes, in some cases that might mean killing them, in which case it must be done without regret or hesitation, but also, probably without hate.  Because in real life, you can see the motives of even the worst of people and with very rare exceptions, they’re not ALL evil.  (And on those rare exceptions, we tend to assume they’re crazy.  Which is silly, but it means they’ve gone that far beyond our scope.)

I don’t think I’m a particularly nice person.  And I don’t think I’m that unusual.  I don’t think most people go around consumed with hates and unreasoning passions that demand either they self-destruct or destruct the object of their obsessive negative passion.

A few, perhaps, but if you think about it, most of the people you know who could genuinely be said to hate someone aren’t people at all.  They’re characters in books or movies.  (And often – Shakespeare excepted – though note even in Romeo and Juliet that’s not the moving force of the main characters, rather of the secondary characters (or perhaps it is a secondary character) – hatred is put in there as a cop out, an easy way to plotting, a way to cram a whole story in an hour with commercial breaks.  “He hated her that much” or worse “he hated some group or other” is the plot equivalent of “and then he went mad and murdered a multitude.)

Is this a problem?  To an extent, though it’s more a reflection of an issue brought on by technology – the prevalence of make-believe stories, emotions and motives in our lives to an extent our ancestors didn’t know – than the cause of the problem.

It only worries me when we use it to close discussion.  Like the commenter who said I hated him, or something of the sort.  (How absurd.  I still don’t hate him, even though he apparently lives under a bridge.  I don’t know him well enough to hate him.  His comments annoyed me, and I blocked him.  I’m not sitting here plotting his death, not even fictionally.)  At the time he said I hated him and was projecting, he was commenting for the first time, and I’d said nothing about hating anyone (well, not in that post.)

I do hate Marxism.  I hate it out of reasoned study.  And I’m ready to explain why I hate it – beyond the death and misery it always brings in its wake. It’s because before it destroys it maims the human spirit, and leaves behind trendrils that might take generations to clean up.

And it worries me that, like the Christie character, we’ve become able to understand only the big emotions, and not the smaller, more shaded ones. This hate and love, and calling others “haters” if they disagree with us (a favorite trick of the left, as are the various ists they accuse us of being)aren’t real. They’re just a tantrum. Having to respond to the tantrum in terms that penetrate means we also abuse words.

This ridiculous quarrel makes us all, even those of us playing defensive, emotional toddlers, carrying in on in a global nursery.

Like all toddler tantrums it will end in tears.

How do we become grown ups? I don’t know. But it starts with reclaiming words.

Are there humans I hate? Well, there are politicians and corruptions of our journalistic profession I despise. Hate?  I hate their actions. I spend a lot of time figuring how to erase those actions. But not how to destroy or kill the people who did them. Because I don’t hate them. I’m just intensely annoyed by them.

I’d like to give them a piece of my mind, not to plunge a dagger in their hearts.

I hate communism (As I hate hell….), but I strongly dislike the way I’m rambling on, seemingly unable to close this post.  I blame it on the slight fever and the headache.  Which truly bothers me. And I hate it. Because I want it to be over.

Quality.  There was a big kerfuffle on quality here, not so long ago, and being me, (and besides you guys deserve it) I’m going to say that you’re both right.  And both wrong.

Is there such a thing as quality in writing?  Sure there is.

Is that quality something in the turn of a phrase, the careful copyediting, the creation of realistic characters, a resonance on social problems that will enlighten us for the ages?

Well… those are nice to have.

Is it how it sells?  Well, sometimes.  The selling system has been pretty gamed in the last thirty years, and anyway even in Indie I bet you there will be good stuff that doesn’t catch and stuff that is eye-crossingly bad that hits it for no reason anyone can figure out.  Word of mouth.  Rumor.  A detail that catches someone influential’s eye.  Who knows?

So, what is that “quality”?  What is that “special something?”  What should you be striving to put in your books?

We’ve established, (right?) that tastes differ.  It’s no use yelling at me I SHOULD like something, and even less use yelling at me I SHOULD like something because tons of people like it or because it’s studied in school. (I HAVE read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, thank you so much.  Even if he weren’t Castro’s bosom buddy, I would find his writing … let’s put it this way – if I want to read pretentious stuff, I’ll read my own first six (unpublished) novels [before I shook the dust of an MBA in Languages and Literatures off my sandals].)

I’ve lived long enough not to be impressed by credentials, ambiance and accolades.  Look, I can enjoy eating at a diner, and I can enjoy eating at a five star restaurant.  My expectations are different.  On the other hand, I’ve honestly found better food at some diners than at some five star restaurants, and the diners are more fun because I can people-watch.

In the same way, I’ve paid my dues, and I’ve read and still read much that people consider worthy, but there’s a time and a place.  I will bow to no one in my enjoyment of Shakespeare.  (Why I should bow is beyond me, anyway.) Or Austen.  Or Dumas (which – my older son is right – is MUCH better in French.)  On the other hand there are people who are probably good but who rub me the wrong way: of the classics, Dickens comes to mind.  I don’t feel the need to admire someone just because everyone agrees he or she is good.  (Much of the literary culture of the last fifty years is more squeak than wool, anyway.)

On the other hand, I feel quite free to read what others consider schlock or low brow and appreciate its (often more) authentic and thoughtful qualities (than the ones in supposedly great literature.)

Take Agatha Christie, for instance.  It has become fashionable to deride her.  She, herself, seemed to think she was writing puzzle stories, more than anything – but I love re-reading her and many of her characters strike a deep and resonant cord.

So – I wasted a page telling you that while there is quality, I don’t think it’s universal, and I don’t think it affects every one the same way.

What the “quality” of that quality is was clinched for me by two historical mystery series (I’m not going to name them because one doesn’t come off well from my evaluation, and this is probably unfair and the other one hit me probably because of rather PARTICULAR reasons, which are not for public consumption.)  They’re both well written.  Both are bestseller series, one by a writer who was a bestseller when she wrote it, the other by a writer who built that series up to bestseller.
Series A, though, was fun to read once, popcorn-like, and I refuse to pay hardcover prices for it, and in fact will not buy it unless it is the only thing I have to read at the time, or it’s deeply discounted/used.  Nothing wrong with it.  There’s tons of series I “like” but don’t love and that’s where they fall, because well… $12 for a paperback is for the birds and I’m not made of money.

Series B grabbed me and pulled me into the story and made me stay there every step of the way.  I couldn’t do something else – I usually read while embroidering – while reading it, and an attempt to listen to an audio book while walking made me tear off the headphones halfway through, because even though I’d ALREADY READ THE BOOK it was going to make me burst into tears in public, and also the confusion of inputs was near-physically painful.  Even though it was more expensive than the first, I bought all the books within a week for kindle because I couldn’t afford paper costs.  (I have now also found a hardcover of the first book at the thrift store. – Does Victory dance!)  I will re-read these books.  I will give them friends.  I will buttonhole strangers and put the books in their hands.

And then I realized what “quality” means to me right now, at this point in history (this is important – I’ll explain why later) – right now “quality” i.e. the quality that RIGHT NOW seems to ensure success, seems to mean the ability to engage the reader’s emotions.

If the book draws you in and makes you feel what the characters feel, that’s quality.

To an extent, it’s always been like that.  I love it when literature professors (rolls eyes) go on and on about how Marlowe is a better playwright than Shakespeare.  It might be true (waggles hand side to side) on a technical level.  Doesn’t matter.  Marlowe, possibly because he died very young AND was exquisitely well educated, didn’t GET the engaging emotions thing (okay, he was very good at horror.)  His plays have a moral flatness, where you don’t really root for everyone because they’re all unpleasant people.  You also don’t want anyone dead, because none of them is more unpleasant than the others.  So, while the scenes and the dialogue might dazzle, you don’t feel the emotions of the characters.  (Again, Marlowe died very young.  Maybe in some other world he grew out of it.)  Shakespeare on the other hand, makes you vibrate along with emotions: bigger than life emotions that you’ll never forget.  [Because I like Kit; because something in his writing DOES appeal to me; and became he was an amazing craftsman, I feel compelled to say he PROBABLY would have grown out of it. There were signs that way.  And my first novels had the same issue as his plays.  You see, I thought I had to write “reality”)

As I said, to an extent it was always true.  HOWEVER the difference is, until recent times, books were also ALMOST the only means for delivery of story.  So, “quality” beyond the emotion stuff could mean a well constructed story.  It could also mean – because of the means of delivery – exquisite prose.

By all means, you should still strive for both of those, but if you don’t achieve it, and still have the big, realistic (realistic-feeling.  They’re usually bigger than life on the paper, so they feel real to you) emotions and leave the person feeling like they lived through it – you’ll still do very well and some number of people will still consider you a superb writer.

On the other hand – trust me on this – you can have beautiful language, perfect plot, an exquisite little puzzle-box of a book, and if you don’t have the emotions, people will either consider you literary (which would be bad, since I have it on the authority of friends laboring in that vineyard that it never sells much) or midlist.

You see, people can watch movies or even play games for the story, but books are the only place they can experience another human being’s emotions.  And THAT is what people crave: the experience of living through the grand emotions without the scars and the regrets.

No book will hit everyone – this is why we disagree so much on quality.  I mean, it would be one thing to analyze sentence and structure and say “this is good” and “this is bad” but – when it’s emotion it’s by nature individual.  What hits my personal buttons might leave you utterly cold or going “uh… it’s okay.”  And stuff that pushes YOUR buttons might hit me with my different experience of life as “Oh, that again?”

So, what should you strive for?  Is it hopeless trying to hit that point that makes readers remember you above all other authors?

Not at all.  Look, if something does it for you, there’s a chance it does it for someone else.  Ric Locke (may eternity rest light upon him) is no longer here to tell us that with ebooks, even if you’d never have reached more than half a dozen people in the old model, there’s potentially millions of readers who share your tastes.  So I’ll say what he would have said.  Write to the emotion.  You know your favorite books and the feeling from them – the feeling like they overwhelm your senses and possess you for a while – that is what you should strive for as a writer.

It’s not as easy as it seems.

First, it is very hard if you were raised in a culture that didn’t hang its emotions on its sleeve (Oh, sure, Latin – but Northern Portugal is HEAVILY influenced by Great Britain, so stiff upper lip and all that.)

Second, there’s a fine line between hitting the emotions and self-indulgent.  You have to remember your characters and situation are more special to you than to ANY reader.  If you get to the point you’re just riding the emotion without end, step back and have someone evaluate it.  Otherwise your reader might be going “Oh, geeze, Louise, your character must get over himself already!)

Third – you can fake that tingle.  You can fake that tingle in a way that fools your readers.  That’s fine.  But sadly, you can fake that tingle in a way that fools you.  This is one of the reasons it’s hard to put sex in books.  If you put sex – particularly sex you, personally, consider transgressive – the emotion will hit you in the face and pull you in…  Thing is, it might not hit anyone else the same way.  If writing explicit sex remember the variety of turn ons and turn offs is mind boggling, and a turn on for you is someone else’s ick-button.  Also, you might be so busy riding (look, stop giggling.  There are no safe words with this topic) the sexual-tingle that you don’t realize there’s nothing else driving your plot.  This is most often done by raw (oh, stop laughing already) beginners, but some old-time professionals do it too.  A particular urban fantasy series seems to have lost the plot and just be piling on the sex to compensate.  So, writing sex – or violence, or architecture if you’re mad about buttresses, or history if that’s your particular bend, or food, if you’re a foodie or anything else that engages you personaly but might not engage anyone else – requires a lot of careful work and seeing through it to the emotions.  (I think I just realized why so many of the crazier paranormal romance writers look like withered up old virgins.  They very well might be.  They don’t feel the tingle, and therefore can keep the plot tension, unaffected by the sex they’re writing.  Um.)

Fourth – no matter how great the “tingle” of emotion you can make your reader feel, you still need good basic grammar, proofreading and fact checking.  I could be reading the most interesting, emotional story set in Shakespeare’s time, but the minute someone pulls out plastic toothpicks, I’m solidly in the present day and not in your story.  See the problem?  So, “I write for the emotion” is not an excuse to write sloppy or not to proof read.

HOWEVER once you have your plot in a row and it makes sense, and your English is good enough to pass muster, you must strive to put in not just emotion – please, remember the Kris Rusch admonition “If your character cries, your reader doesn’t have to” – but things that stimulate emotion in the reader.

You won’t hit everyone – but if you hit a significant number of people, your work will be read and reread, hand-sold by readers to other readers AND (if you care about that) remembered.  And you’ll rise head and shoulders over other, similar writers.

So, learn to be a manipulative author.  Your readers will thank you.

No, this is not an article on how to take a story in a genre and turn it into another.  I can do that too, if you guys wish, sometime in the future.  It is not uncommon and, anyway, it is as good a technique for beginning writers as it is for beginning painters to copy the work of a master because before they understand composition, they can feel in their guts and bones what “good” is.

Yes, there is such a thing as “good” and such a thing as “quality” – after all you have to know what to strive for when you’re trying to improve your writing – but that’s an article for another time, particularly since “good” and “quality” have been as maligned as “hate” which can now be used to mean “I’m annoyed.”  (And by the way, no, dears, quality and good probably don’t mean what you think they mean, not when it comes to art.  But blah, none of my business provided you don’t yell it in my face.)  And yes, the hate thing is an article too.

This is not even an article about “tastes can’t be argued” though it touches tangentially on it.  What I’m talking about here is talking about things you know nothing about because they’re not to your taste.  Not that it’s any of my business to advise you on this, mind, but a lot of you are brilliant people who don’t realize how silly you sound when you expound on what’s not at all to your interest.

This was brought about because in an email I told someone I didn’t read (traditional) heroic fantasy anymore because I got tired of girl-with-sword-saves-the-world and all men are evil.  The gentleman rather politely told me that he’d never come across those.  Which is when I realized I was flapping my lips on something I know nothing about.

And it’s not even something I NEVER knew anything about.  It’s just something I haven’t read in about twenty years (which since at the time I was reading used, means probably twenty five to thirty year old information) when I got tired of the two above plots and the plot device known as “cruel father” (used in Darkship Thieves?  Don’t be ridiculous.  If you read it you’ll realize it’s no such thing!) threw a book against the wall and never picked it up again.

I was in point of fact flapping my lips and showing my ignorance.

I’m hardly alone in this.

BTW if you’re new to fantasy or science fiction and in a panel with me feel an urge to say something like “I just want to know why we can’t have strong female characters in these two genres.  Why must the woman always be rescued?”  DON’T.  Or if you do be aware that you’re putting your life on the line.

No, I don’t hate hearing it.  At most I strongly dislike it.  But when you feel my fingers around your throat as I scream “Like every strong main female character since the late eighties at least?” you might have trouble telling the difference.

And as I pound you with the nearest object (usually there’s a pitcher of water) and scream “How about we also have strong males now?  Can we do that?” it might really get hard to tell.  Because when you say that, you’re talking not only out of ignorance, but out of smug, self-satisfied ignorance, and repeating stuff you heard without the courtesy of at least reading in the genre you’re trying to sell in.

I’ll tolerate this sort of idiocy if you’re not trying to sell in the genre, because I’ll assume you never read it, and are just flapping lips with received wisdom.  (See, I’m not trying to sell heroic, traditional fantasy, so bonus for me.  I’ll still shut up about it in the future.)  But when you’re sitting there at the table, with your copy of Marysue Doright To The Stars, the book you just wrote to prove women can too be heroes, it’s very, very hard not to beat you with a copy of Podkayne of Mars or the collected volumes of the Honor Harrington saga.

And condemning entire genres because they’re not to your taste is also silly.  Oh, don’t misinterpret me.  You’re perfectly allowed not to LIKE a genre.  In fact, you’re allowed to loathe it…  Hell, you’re allowed to not like it or loathe it without having EVER read a single piece.

We live in a highly specialized society and we’re all the products of rather individual development.  Well, okay, maybe not all.  I often think half the population is cranked out in a factory somewhere.  But for all that, the truth is if you get to know someone, you’re bound to find that they’re not as… standard as you think.

Someone has coined the “Normal is a city” (apparently in Illinois — who knew?)  I’m not sure I agree with that because “normal” as in “functioning well enough to perform in daily life” is a broad tent, and it fits any number of idiosyncrasies.  (My neighbors don’t need to know I build worlds in my head, and the gentleman who ran out of his house when I was walking Marshall to elementary school shortly after we moved here, dropped in front of me and – groveling around – performed one of the more heart-wrenching soliloquies of Lear was probably perfectly normal when he wasn’t rehearsing so intensely he rather literally forgot himself. [And wasn’t he lucky he got me?  Someone else might have dialed 9-11.  I was momentarily charmed, I confess, at the idea of guerrilla eruptions of Shakespeare, but no, he was just rehearsing and probably thought to freak the mundanes.  Served him right that Marshall corrected a line!])

But none of us are… mass products.  Despite those of us born roughly at the mid-century mark of the 20th century (or twenty years either way) having gone through a system of mass education and being fed our news through mass systems for most of our lives, most of us are still shockingly individual.  (A built in issue for future worlds like 1984, say, or the people who think it’s an instruction manual.)  Genetics, environment and the sheer cussedness that is humanity means you can have twins raised by the same parents, and at least some of their tastes will be startlingly different.

Why am I prattling about that?  Because even your best friends; even those who like the exact same genres of literature you do will NOT have the same tastes.  (And this doesn’t mean there ISN’T quality, just that some of the quality I’ll be completely blind to, it not being my thing.)  For years you could have sold tickets to the epic arguments my best writing buddy and I would get into when our favorite authors were mentioned.  I find her favorite utterly bland and unconvincing, and she finds mine annoying.  Neither of us has read the other’s favorite extensively, mind.  Just enough to determine “it’s not my thing.”  And yes, we might have been better served by reading a different book, say, or at a different time.  However, it’s no use disputing because given the infinite choice of what you CAN read, why bother revisiting someone who disappointed you a couple of times?  And why bother trying to convince someone they “MUST” read this when they’ve already told you they hate the genre/subgrenre/type/author?

(Yes, I’m guilty of that sin too, having grabbed random strangers and screamed, “No, no, those books were BEFORE he became Pratchett.  Read Night Watch you illiterate buffoon” – it’s bad of me and I shouldn’t do it.  And in the future I’ll try to refrain UNLESS the person in question is trying to write Pratchetterian fantasy in which case I’ll beat her/him to death with the collected witches’ saga.)

For centuries – millenia?  Forever –  it’s been known that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.  And for centuries one man has sneered at the other for this.  Only now, there are so many varieties of meat, we’re convinced there must be “the one true meat” which feeds everyone.

Let’s put this in another venue: I must sometime remember to thank my friend Kate Paulk for coining The Meaty Skull With Snakes Style Of Art phrase in her Con books.

Every con I go to the art show, partly because I’m a penniless writer and in years when the economy is bad you can pick up stunning pieces for under $50.  Also because as a penniless writer, I like to encourage penniless artists.  I’m always happy to pick up a very good but not quite there piece from a young artist starting out.  Because that will hopefully work like a first short story sale upon a beginning writer.

And every con I find the art show has at least one stall, and sometimes as many as half of them, filled with Meaty Skull With Snakes Style of Art.  You know the canvases when you see them.  They make you fall back in sheer horror at the “OMG WHY?” sprays of arterial blood, the axes with bits of flesh clinging to them.

I’d never buy one of those pieces, not even if they were the best paintings in the world.  And yet I have friends who collect them and put them on their walls to look at every day.  They’d probably find my semi-nude winged beings which I tend to buy for my walls (hey, you have your kinks, Mr.) blah.

Of course my real taste is renaissance art – and there we’re touching on quality again and it’s well… for another time – but it’s very hard to go back in time and buy a little-appreciated DaVinci.  (My younger son assures me work on the time-space portal continues apace.)

As a consequence, I can’t tell you anything at all about the artists who do this.  I know they exist.  I mean, at a con in New England, the artist guest of honor had paintings of meaty skulls, and sculptures of meaty skulls, and possibly taste tests of meaty skulls.  How the heck would I know?  It’s not my thing.

In the same way, I know next to bl**dy nothing about the names in contemporary romance.  I know Nora Roberts, is about it.  After that I draw a complete blank.  And frankly Nora Roberts – though her writing is magnificent (if you don’t think so, you haven’t read her ever.  She’s both transparent and carries the story very well) doesn’t do it for me. I find her women an irritant. They do irrational things, just to prove they can. I do best at hearing her narrated than reading her.

Are other contemporary romance heroines the world’s greatest twits?  Who knows?  I’ve sampled a couple here and there – like the one where the two main characters spend the first fifty pages in bed and the poor guy should have called his GP because it’s way more than four hours, having sex and discussing the world’s most vapid subjects.  Is this representative of the genre?  Eh.  Probably not.  But now those failures of sampling have caused me to be more cautious and contemporary romances have a higher bar to sell to me.

Until seven years ago, the same applied to ALL romance.  And then Dave Freer convinced me sample Georgette Heyer.  This made me aware at least SOMEONE could write romance I would read.  And then…  And then I got stuck at RWA, giving away books, next to Madeleine Hunter.  Both of us had piles of books.  My editor refused to let me build a fort and hide behind mine.  For the first half hour I had no one (then I had a line, and I finished before everyone.)  So, out of sheer boredom, I grabbed one of Hunter’s books (well, I HAD read mine.  Have to, to edit it.  Also, rumors I type with my toes while blindfolded are exaggerated) and started reading.  I now have most of her books and haven’t been able to finish only two.

This introduced me to regency romance in general.  Yeah, the vast majority (of everything, not just romance) is crap, but I’ve learned to find nuggets of gold.

Still, even now, because Romance is something I read when I’m out of sorts and because I buy them on discount at the thrift store (I did mention I was cheap, right?), I couldn’t tell you who the luminaries of the field are nor would I presume to say something in public like “So and so is one of the seminal influences of the field” – unless the so and so is Heyer and the field is Regency Romance specifically.  Much less would I go as far as Jane Austen, whom most young writers know only by the execrable movie.  And did the Bronte sisters influence anyone working now?  Probably.  And I hope I never read her.  Most of the people working now?  Oh, please.  Unless through a movie, I doubt it.

H*ll I do read mystery, more or less obsessively – though in waves – and I don’t know half the people publishing today.

And sometimes genres still surprise me, as Romance did.  I’d have said I’d never, ever, ever read Christian fiction published as such.  NOT because I have anything against it in particular, but because the few I’ve sampled were HORRIBLY written.  Probably because it’s a restricted field that people will buy for reasons other than quality, I tend to find incoherent plots and instead of a journey of faith, I find a rambling book with occasional declarations of faith or pauses for prayer.  And yet, I found one for free on Amazon, set in WWII and didn’t read the description enough to catch on it was Christian, so I read it.  It’s mainstreamish in reading, but a very good book.  (I’ll find the name if you wish.  It’s in my kindle.  I have ordered two of her other books, but they seem to have wandered off from my room.  I haven’t read them yet.)

But in general I’ll tell you I don’t read erotica, horror, YA, contemporary romance or procedurals.  There are exceptions to all these – people at the edge, whom I like – but in general those hold true.  I do sample all of these now and then, and have learned to see when it’s “well done” even if it makes me recoil.

HOWEVER I guarantee to you there are good writers in erotica, horror, YA, contemporary romance AND procedurals.  I bet you there are authors I would like, but I’ll never know unless I stumble on them.  And there are authors I would loathe but say “they’re doing it right.”

So, I learned my lesson.  When talking about genres or subgenres I don’t read or unless I’ve read it recently, I’ll keep my mouth shut on quality, because I don’t KNOW.  Keeping my mouth shut is probably of benefit to no one.  In fact, it might annoy those who wish to laugh at me.  BUT it will preserve my – tattered – reputation for omniscience.

You can choose to do as you please, but you should be aware dogmatic pronouncements about what you don’t know might make people laugh like hyenas.  (Or answer in puzzled and gentle politeness as my correspondent did.)

On the other hand when WRITING in a genre, do at least try to read the last twenty years of your particular subgenre – or at least skim.  That will save you from craving “strong women heroes” in a field awash with them.

And it will save me from beating you to death with a copy of your brand spanking new book: MarySue Does The Space Navy.

Because they’re an active bunch of little bees.  Besides being amusing in the comments, I mean.

This is what I got this week.  If any of you had anything new come out in the last month (since I only started this a week ago) let me know in the comments, and I’ll put it up.  For some reason my email is being refractory, so if you sent me stuff and I didn’t answer, I probably didn’t get it.  But I’ll update the post.

Also because I get (mumblety) zillion emails a day if you send me something you want to appear here on Saturday morning, send it with the subject “Commenter book” (even if it’s an appearance.)  That way I can do a search.

There will be a post — after eliptical, breakfast and possibly shower.  Until then there’s this in the order it got to me.

UPDATE: CELIA HAYES HAS COUPONS TO SAVE YOU MONEY ON HER BOOKS, SO:

I got this from Mike Weatherford

I’ve been posting chapters of my new novel, “Greenfields”, on my website, similar to what you’re doing with “Witchfinder”, except the book’s already written.  So far, I’m not getting any comments.  I don’t have any “alpha” or “beta” readers, and I do know I need some help from time to time.  Can you help?  My website is “Old Patriot’s Pen” (http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/), and there are some outright political things there from time to time.

And yesterday he updated: All of “Greenfields” is now posted to my weblog, “Old Patriot’s Pen” (http://oldpatriot.blogspot.com/).

Steve Poling says his anthology is human wave and says:

I apologize for not thinking to ask you earlier for the honor of a
mention of /Finding Time/, available at Amazon here
<http://bit.ly/chooseft>.

(I’m not sure why he is apologizing.  The mind-blank writer should have offered to do this before.)

Celia Hayes left this in the comments last week (I never got the email.)  That means, if you need to be told, that the event is THIS weekend.

… this weekend, I am going up to Comfort, Texas, to participate in the 150th anniversary observations of the Nueces Fight, at the ‘True to the Union’ monument, where the dead were eventually buried, three years later. I’ll be working up discount coupons through Smashwords for all of my books, which will be good for about a week or so.

Ok, end of personal plug. Back to the usual… But for an explaination of the Nueces Fight – here is Part 1: http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/the-nueces-fight-and-true-to-the-union/
And part 2: http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/the-nueces-fight-conclusion/
Not all the tragedies of our Civil War took place east of the Mississippi.
Sabrina Chase adds: The second book in my *totally* human wave SF trilogy, Raven’s Children, came out last month. And my very first print version of my fantasy The Last Mage Guardian just went live this week. Linkages: http://amzn.to/OaCF8y http://amzn.to/QVTicy

Cyn Bagley:

AWK – On my blog http://scrambledsage.blogspot.com I am putting up chapters of Perchance to Dream, which is the novel I am working on this year.

My 10,000 word story Billy the Kid is a paranormal romance which I put up on amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008RCKYLI which I put up this month.

Oh yea, a review on Prime Target on my blog.

I love human wave…

[and because of that, we’ll forgive her misspelling “hawk” — runs.]

From Stryder Barlow

Ok, from Saturday the 11th of August until Monday the 13th, my short story is FREE on Kindle, if you don’t own a kindle, Amazon lets you download the Kindle software for your PC or Mac, to read Kindle books on too.

(This really nice lady named Sarah Hoyt put together my cover for me, she’s the best!)

Survival is about two little girls who grow up together, one dreams of reaching for the stars, the other of travelling among them. (This story, was inspired by hearing the lyrics ‘so you’re back, from outer space.’)

http://www.amazon.com/Survival-ebook/dp/B008VGPYPG/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1344682302&sr=8-4&keywords=Stryder+Dancewolffe

[Note from SH — and yes, I’ll help people with covers, provided you hit me when I have time or am trying to avoid writing.  Actually I HATE bad covers, even though mine aren’t the BEST, and I try to help people with them if I have a chance.]