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Back when I was in school, one of the things that used to astonish me was most people’s lack of originality.  By which I don’t mean that they didn’t have enough piercings or tattoos (I have a culturally inherited phobia of making permanent alterations to my body, which is why my parents refused to pierce my ears and I got teased about it.  I then pierced my ears myself at eighteen, but I wear earrings so rarely I’ve had to re-pierce them twice.)

What I mean is that when teachers gave writing (or drawing, but we’ll go with writing) assignments most people would echo our last reading assignment.  Worse, most of them didn’t seem to be aware they’d done it, or to what extent they’d done it.  And EVEN WORSE most teachers didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with it.

Okay, to give a concrete example: sixth grade – we spent four months reading a book about a poor kid who finds a stray dog and nurses him to health.  (Okay, the class spent four months.)  I read it that evening, then I hid SF books under the book and kept an ear on the discussion while I read my way through the golden age.  (Hell is a language and literature class that moves at the pace of a normal 11 year old.)

At the end, we were told to write an essay or story that involved friendship with a dog.  Ninety percent of the class wrote back a summary of the book, even though that was NOT the assignment.  I mean, they didn’t even try to write say about how we make dogs and dogs make us, which is what I would have done, had I written an essay.  The rest of the class – except me, of course! – wrote “stories” which were in fact reworded scenes from the book.  They ranged from “barely reworded” to “completely rewarded” to “Might have extended the scene” but they were still IN FACT part of someone else’s work, using their characters.  No, calling the boy Mike instead of Michael did NOT make him a different boy.

Me, well, I wrote a story of a magical dog and three wishes.  Okay, not stunningly creative.  Look, kid, I was 11 and it was an in-class essay, unannounced.

That same year, when asked to make up a legend, I got my story downgraded and got penalized because one of my classmates said he’d read it in “a book somewhere” (No, he effing well hadn’t, though I daresay he’d read a dozen like it.  It was an enchanted maiden story [per instructions] and that has limits) and the teacher agreed that word choice, coherence and detail were beyond an 11 year old.  SO I MUST have copied it.

Yes, I am still steamed about that thirty eight years later, why do you ask?  The fact my parents were of the school that the teacher is always right meant no one would fight for me, and that was one of the grossest injustices I’ve had to deal with.  (And part of the reason I fight for my boys in similar circumstances.)

Taken in their totality, and added to the rest of my career, I’ve come to the scary conclusion most of the human race can’t create at all.  They can’t even create in the limited amounts that require you to mash together two forms/thoughts/stories.

Worse, most people can’t tell when you’re being creative or not.  It’s not a put on, they HONESTLY can’t.  They don’t even know WHAT creative is.  I’ve had “stunningly creative” applied to some of my work where I was phoning it in – and it clearly wasn’t – and I’ve heard “stunningly creative” applied to other people’s work that makes me want to scream “no, taking twilight but making her fall in love with the werewolf instead, is NOT creative.”

Of course, if you ARE capable of creating you tend to underrate how creative you are.  You know who you stole from – even if heavily disguised.  Of course, sometimes you don’t.  I didn’t realize to what extent Darkship Thieves was Heinlein fanfic, for instance because the things I hit the same way are incidental to the story.  Stuff like “Fresher” for bathroom – and that’s because I grew up reading Heinlein and it has become, in a way, interwoven in the fibers of my being.  My consolation is that he did the same, to an extent, to Mark Twain, and hey, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.  (My future history, etc. is actually my own and differs from Heinleinian future history in marked degrees, though both follow TANSTAAFL and such, logically.)  But in re-reading Darkship before I wrote the sequel I kept going “Oh, G-d.  I could have made up another word!” (The different is before the read I’d re-read Heinlein.  Before writing it I hadn’t.  Hence the “fibers of my being” thing.)

Anyway, this was a shock when I entered school because my family WAS creative.  Someone trying to just re-write a scene from a book would get laughed at at the dinner table.  So.  Now every time I venture out into the world, in the middle of people not engaged in writing for a living, I’m shocked by this creative inability anew.  The family my husband and I married is creative, the boys wildly so.  So.

So we come up against a problem that has bedeviled Academy the last several years, and which will hit indie hard.

When I taught college English comp I was given a packet of what I was expected to do in grading papers.  I’d done this before, in the late eighties.  I didn’t realize since then the requirement to be omniscient had entered the profession.  Because, you see, the packet instructed me to give zero for ANY plagiarized paper copied from online, or any paper from an essay service.  The thing is – do you KNOW how many papers there are on line?  I can’t read all of them!

What I did was to take random sentences from suspiciously well written (compared to that student) papers and run them through search engines.  I never caught anyone red-handed, but then I KNOW a lot of these papers are behind pay walls or subscription walls.

For my money, if I had to plagiarize a paper in school, I’d go and find an OLD book of essays, or a thesis, the kind of thing no one reads, something not digitized and copy THAT.  Of course, beyond the moral wrongness of such act, my pride would never allow me to do that.  And beyond all that, the type of person who isn’t creative enough to write his/her own essay is also not creative about where he/she finds it.

Since I quit teaching for the fabulously well paid career of author (Snort, giggle) I’ve kept in touch with kids one way or another.  Sometimes they invade my blog – er… okay, that only happened once years ago, but it lasted for a month.  And yes, I also still resent that.  Did I EVER say I was a good person? – and sometimes friends’ kids, or kids’ friends ask me to review something for them.

I will point out both sets of young people are among what we would class as the best and brightest of their class.

Houston, we have a problem.

Creativity hasn’t got any better in the younger generation.  Heinlein maintained the percentage of people in a population who could truly create was fixed.  It might be.  We keep discovering this sort of ratio, though we’re not sure how it holds.  BUT the problem is that on top of that, these people  – BRIGHT young people who can speak just fine – can’t carry a sentence from beginning to end and make sense.  It’s not just logic that’s tortured.  It’s grammar and syntax.

Yes, yes, I know, these blog posts lock grammar, syntax and punctuation in a dungeon room and do kinky stuff to them.  BUT I write them while half asleep one way or another and I do no more than a cursory (and fast) typo hunt.  The essays I see from those kids are… proofread, worked on.

And yes, I KNOW I do this for a living.  Is it possible I’m judging them too harshly?  Well… maybe, but I don’t think so.  I used to teach, remember, ten years ago.  And even from ten years ago, the level of writing has gone way down.

I could hazard guesses as to why, including what they did with my older son’s class, where they let them learn spelling “free form” and “from reading.”  Which means as smart and articulate as he is, I still need to yell at him over egregious spelling mistakes.

When he was in third grade, I realized they weren’t teaching him ANYTHING relating to expression, writing and word usage.  NOTHING.  His essays read incomprehensible to me.  This is when – according to him – I started a reign of terror.  If you hear him tell it, he was an innocent happy child and I scarred him for life.

Maybe.  I’m pleading the fifth.  What I did was make him read – at first aloud, because he was pretending to read and/or skipping whole paragraphs – great essays.  I checked out of the library books of famous essays and I had him read them aloud.  Then I had him write essays.  And I deployed the sarcasm for every glopped sentence and every thought that led nowhere.

I’m happy to report within three weeks the boy could write essays upside down, sideways and possibly underwater.  And then I did it again with my second child at a somewhat older age.

What this means to me is that the kids CAN be taught.  They just aren’t being.  Heaven knows why.  That’s not even the point of this blog.  (Just let me tell you if you have a child in K-12 MAKE SURE THEY CAN READ AND WRITE.  Also, buy them a Strunk and White and make them read it aloud to you.)

The point of this blog is that now even the small minority born with (well, you explain it!) the ability to create and the verbal fluency that leads to story telling will have issues expressing themselves.  And that they might not even have any idea when they’re committing plagiarism by stealing others’ words.

I’m not worried about their getting stuck, btw – the kids, by and large, are always all right.  These poor children just have a much steeper slope to competency.  They’ll get there, once they realize there’s a problem.

Here’s what I’m worried about, though: when you couple how little even creative people create, unconscious leaning on someone else’s work which all of us do (Heinlein: They all steal from each other) because DUH we’re social monkeys, and not even being aware of what good writing is… we have a massive problem.

I said before the least creative people can’t even seem to understand what CREATIVE is.  They’ll commit plagiarism without noticing.

Now, most of them, thank heavens, don’t aspire to being novelists.  But there might be half a dozen delusional enough to try it, considering how sad our education is right now.

We could end up with a bunch of inadvertent plagiarists who’ve never been informed writing a scene from someone else’s novel and changing the names is NOT a short story.  And here’s the thing, they can put it right up there for sale.

Now, look, let’s not be dramatic.  This has ALWAYS happened, even with traditional publishing.  I can’t remember the name, but not so long ago, they found that some “literary” darling had copied almost in whole books from a “hack” romance writer.  Different character names, different titles.  And yep, this went through a major house.

So… what can be done about it?  Well…  NOT legislate it.  Any law passed on it will simply be used by would-be gatekeepers to go after anything they don’t like.  (Say, accuse me of plagiarism because I use the word “Fresher” for bathroom.)

It is a problem, but there is no problem so bad a law can’t make it worse.

Here’s my suggestion:

First, police yourself.  I do.  Obsessively.  Yeah, I let certain words get through.  I tell people I grew up in Heinlein books, they’re part of who I am and you write from who you are.  Deal.  I disagree with my literary daddy enough on matters of future history, (well, I grew up in different countries and generations) that we don’t overlap enough to repeat the same stories.  Yes, you could say Darkship is my answer to Friday – and to an extent A Few Good Men is my answer to TMIAHM, (which remains my favorite book) but the actuation of the same “principles” in very differently built worlds makes ALL the difference.  And “Yes but” is a valid reason to write a science fiction novel.

Where you need to police yourself is in the things you don’t/wouldn’t think of stealing.  They’re not part of you.  You don’t read them for fun.  There is a reason most of us – unless editing or working with half a dozen VERY close friends/mentees – don’t read other people’s stuff.  I’ve had newbies ping me on facebook begging me to read their novel and tell them if they’re aiming in the right direction.  Beyond the fact that I just don’t have TIME, it terrifies me.  The things I’ve found getting under my radar (never more than a paragraph or a character name) are usually from stuff I read from my kids, or a sentence in a news blog.

You’re only human.  You’ll “lift” minor stuff.  But do try to prevent yourself from doing it.

Second – police others.  NOT obsessively, and for the love of heaven, don’t go and report someone to Amazon because you “think you read it somewhere” like that boneheaded boy in my sixth grade comp class.  (He’s so lucky I’ve forgotten his name, isn’t he?)  BUT if you come across a passage and remember it from another book, go and check.  Apparently there is the charming habit of lifting wholesale and reselling under another name/cover.  So, if you find one of those, yeah, that’s reason to report it.  (No, I don’t mean same plot.  If you read Romance, or some fantasy, you’d NEVER do anything else.  I mean, if it’s word per word the same book.  Report it.  DO.)

If it’s not word per word, but you find a few pages (let’s not try to go to the level of a sentence or two.  That’s just … what it is.  Sometimes a sentence is just right, and you don’t remember reading it before, and if you’re head is a word-cement-mixer it can happen.) that are the same, it might be appropriate to tell the author.  Politely and under “Well, sorry.  I don’t think you realize you did that.”  And then of course that author bears watching.  VERY carefully.  And if you get one of those emails and they are right, DO watch yourself.  (No, it’s never happened to me.  NO, I don’t think it could happen.  Not pages, word per word.  BUT I’ve been very ill while writing some books, and I wrote one – Draw One In The Dark – while so concussed I was experiencing “lost time”.  Could I have done it then?  Gah.  At the time I was terrified I was killing people during the hours I’d lost. [As far as I can tell, mostly I went shopping.  Which is just weird.])

I’m firmly convinced no more plagiarism is taking place than ever has.  It’s just that now it’s our responsibility and we don’t want it to give indie a bad name.  The big guys only need an excuse to regulate us out the whazoo.

So…

Third and most importantly: if you have kids, if you mentor kids, if you teach – teach them what true creativity is, and what plagiarism is.  Teach them plagiarism is illegal.  Explain that intellectual property IS still property.  And that writing the same story but calling the kid Mike is not wildly creative.  Explain to them that data might be free, but the compilation of data isn’t.  Story forms might be free, but the expression of the story ISN’T.

Kids aren’t stupid.  They will learn.  It’s just that no one is teaching them.

Yes, this is a variation on a theme.  Having told you how happy I am with Avengers’ heroes and with the idea of it as Human Wave, I must confess I find its villain… well…

Now before you throw things at me, kindly remember I didn’t see any of the setup movies.  My commenters have informed me there’s material I should see in the Thor movie, particularly the deleted scenes.  I believe them.

Also, as further excuse, I do realize that Avengers is a comic book based movie.  We’re lucky to get heroes that make – at least some – sense.  A villain who wants to rule the world is just par for the course.  Particularly a villain who wants to rule the world and is open about it.

Let’s make it clear right now that I much – MUCH – prefer this to the “tortured” villains of the seventies, victims of society or whatever it was they were, who really were the true victims and to be mourned.

Not that I blame the seventies for ruining villains in American storytelling (this, like the rare occasions in which I do prefer something Portugal does to something in the US is one of those times you should make a note.  It’s pretty rare.  Having turned eight in 1970, I hold the seventies responsible for most pathologies of literature, fashion and movie making.  Yes, I do have proof.  An age that enshrined bell bottoms was clearly a nexus of evil.  PARTICULARLY elephant bells – a style known as “looks good on none.”)

No, I think what makes most villains of American – not Loki, who, at least is genuinely villainous, if somewhat simplistic as presented in the movie – storytelling a lot of “fail” is two fold.  First, we are a nation of rejects.  Either us or our ancestors came here because we were either not wanted, not successful, or hated wherever we were.  Add to that that we are – by necessity – a society with no uniform outer (or even cultural – to the extent cookery and dress are cultural) characteristics, it’s no wonder we developed a pash for the under dog.  And it’s impossible to start telling a story with a twisty villain without starting to wonder if he’s an underdog.  What made him that way?  How come he has such a need to hurt and/or dominate?

The second reason is sitcoms.  Or perhaps pop psychology to the extent that it permeated television writing at the time Americans got a TV in every home.  Within the confines of the sitcom, which had to come back every week, with more or less the same cast, it was impossible to have a Loki who just wants to enslave humans.  Your evils had to be smaller and even your villains had to be somewhat sympathetic, so people would continue tuning in.  To this day I’m completely flabbergasted by how easily sitcom disputes are settled, by having everyone “see” why the “villain” is “doing wrong” out of misconceptions or some justifiable sense of victimhood.  As pop psychology has become discredited, the solution seems to be to make every sitcom character unbearably stupid or completely insane.  (I loved Friends which I discovered just before 9/11 and was the first sitcom I watched in decades – mostly in reruns.  Perhaps love is too strong a word.  I spent weeks after 9/11 dumbly sitting in front of the TV, alternating between the news, reruns of friends, and Buffy.  I didn’t want to think and reading was to much like thinking.  But perhaps because of that I STILL have a soft spot for the series.  However, fair is fair.  If those people existed, ALL of them should be heavily medicated, if not actually in a padded cell.)

The problem is that we tend to translate things we see regularly as “truth” in our back brain, and I think most Americans in generations – three? – that grew up with sitcoms don’t even realize that they’ve been tricked into thinking there is a definable pop-psychology reason at the back of every horrible action and nasty villain.

I’ll say this for Americans – in this case, Americans by upbringing and heritage and therefore somewhat excluding me (to the extent I wasn’t raised here.  Including me to the extent I had enough American TV and movies to have a veneer of it.) – Despite the barrage of “poor him” villains, they prefer really honest-to-goodness bad guys.  Movies in the seventies did better abroad than in the US (possibly because pop psychology and also the idea they’re victims – mostly in their own minds of the US, but I don’t have the time to go into that – are really popular over there.) and there is a reason “make my day” entered the vernacular.

Also, Heinlein, with honest to goodness villains – no?  Did you read the psychoanalysis and cure within three pages of Wormface? – was way moer popular than the “psychologically deep” stories of the present.  (There were other reasons.  I’m not saying that’s the only one.)

The thing is that we know what good villains are.  Shakespeare had a lot of good villains.  Except for Hamlet, where we’re never absolutely sure WHO the villain is and which, yes, is “deep” and possible to analyze back to front and front to back in about ten different ways, (I suspect that Shakespeare had just been given Prozac, or possibly Freud by a time-traveler.  Shud up you.  I’m an SF writer.  I can come up with this cr*p if I want to.  And yeah, Hamlet is WORTH IT in a way, but it is not [unless severely cut to eliminate ambiguity] a “popular entertainment” template.  And if ALL of Shakespeare’s plays had followed that model, we’d now be going as we do about Marlowe “Uh, I guess people really liked blood on stage.” [A lot of Marlowe’s plays follow that template, and both sides are equally unpleasant so you just want them all dead.  Something I note Shakespeare ended up giving in to in Hamlet.])

I mean, think about it… The Scottish play?  Love of power, until he is “in blood steeped so far”; do you really care what Regan and Goneril’s reasons were?  While I agree with Agatha Christie’s character in the moving finger that “they must have been twisted inside by their crazy old father” in the end, they chose their bed and MUST lie in it.

Heinlein too does not give in to the temptation to rehabilitate his villains or make their actions completely explicable.  We might understand what drives Bella Darkin, but though she’s rendered rather pathetic in the end, she’s not rehabilitated, much less made into a kind of Worthy Victim.  (For those who do not have their Heinlein at their fingertips, this is The Door Into Summer.  Yes, there are other examples.  It’s too early and I am insufficiently caffeinated.  You’ll just have to deal.)

I’ll add that using a cliched villain like Loki (well, we know he’s bad, because we know Norse Myth) is not only infinitely preferable to “everyone has his reasons” villainy because it allows you to cheer for the good guys and throw orange peels at the villain – it is preferable, also, because it saves us from that ultimate bane of inept storytelling villainy when “suddenly” an otherwise good character “goes insane” and starts being evil.  This might have receded in popularity or I might have stopped seeing so much of it because I’ve learned to pick my books better.  But there was a time I almost gave up reading mysteries because of its sister/cousin plot of “the murderer is a mass murderer who is insane.”  Usually, mind, because his childhood was so bad, creating a more sinned against than sinner thing.

But, Sarah, you say – you use the “the villain has reasons and can be rehabilitated thing” with Red Dragon in the shifters’ series and partially the horrible childhood with the Mules in the Darkship series.  Yeah, okay – Sarah drums fingers on the desk.  You, readers who exist only in my head, are entirely too mouthy, you know that? – but look, Red Dragon has been established as not the sharpest knife in the drawer in DOITD – er… well… he’s not actually so much dumb as young and terrified – I DO kill the other two guys.  And the Great Sky Dragon remains a villain throughout, if a complex villain because much of what he does is cultural.  but cultural is not the same as excusable, only explainable.  The same goes for the Mules and their lousy childhood.  While they ALL have a lousy childhood, some go on to be admirable, or close to it, and some are the scum of the Earth.  I don’t mind presenting (at least partial) explanation for villainy.  I think that makes it more satisfying, frankly.  BUT it’s never a complete explanation.  The complete explanation MUST in the end ALWAYS be volition.  The character has CHOSEN to do evil, and therefore no matter how many explanations, punishment (in various degrees) is always in order.

The opposite type of villain is ENTIRELY anti-human wave because it trivializes evil, and by doing so taints us all with its brush.  It sounds profound to say “in their circumstances, you’d have done the same” but again it is one of those false-profound pronouncements, like saying that poverty causes crime.  Many criminals are poor and MIGHT have been pushed into their path by poverty, (I maintain this is very hard to tell, because ultimately criminals lie.  And if they spy a way to make themselves sound like victims and turn moral judgement away, they WILL.  Look, I grew up in a village that was dirt poor by American standards, and where most people didn’t have keys to their doors.  My grandmother’s kitchen door was open summer and winter, and if she were out this could only be ascertained by my going in and calling her.  Now the village is infinitely richer and people have iron bars on every window.  If I had to pick a reason I’d say it was because in the sixties we didn’t KNOW we were poor. [We were better off than past generations and no one was starving.] Now they know they’re ‘poor’ in comparison to what they see in movies – particularly the glitzy movie-millionaires’ lives.  This makes the root cause of crime ENVY, not poverty.  Yes, this is my opinion.  Again, deal.)  On the other hand there must be millions of people in the world who are poor – even dirt poor – and are scrupulously honest and trustworthy.  To view poverty as the root cause of crime is to make every one of these poor but decent human beings into a villain in potentia, and, thereby, to splatter every human with evil.  To justify the villains to the extent of making them entirely understandable and “I’d be the same in the same circumstances” makes all of humanity loathsome.

So, what would be my rules for villains properly done?

1- Your villains must be evil.  I don’t mean they should come on stage twirling their moustaches (though this is effective if they are female!) and stating how evil they are, but this (a villain like Loki or Richard III in Shakespeare) is by far preferable to the softly wounded villain who can be fixed with sudden insight and who is more sinned against than sinner.  (If you find yourself thinking “root causes” drop it.)  And BOTH are preferable to the “And then the good guy went insane” villain. (If you think this is a clever, never before seen twist, you HAVE to read more.)

2- Your villains must be powerful.  Again, unless you’re doing comic books or something that echoes of it, or a send up of that type of storytelling, please stay away from “You must give me a billion dollars or I’ll destroy the world.”  If your villain doesn’t have a piranha tank, you can’t pull this off.  Remember that.  (An exception here is that it’s perfectly allowable for the villains’ henchemen to be STUPID – because, if the guy is really, openly evil – or evil enough – WHO would work for him?  Which brings us to point three.)

3- Evil is seductive.  Look, kids, the only way that Avengers could resolve the “if this guy is truly so evil, openly evil, why would good people work for him?” conundrum is the “heart shot” thing.  Mind control, in other words.  This is okay for a certain type of book, in a certain type of circumstance.  It can’t – however – be used everywhere.  And “he’s a mesmerizing speaker” is ONLY part of the explanation.  Yes, I’m going to make an argument ad Hitlerium.  Sorry.  But there it is – as memorable a speaker as he might have been or as his contemporaries convinced themselves he was (this is always hard to judge. Social pressure CAN convince people of this stuff) – he got honorable people to do what was patently evil.  He did this by SEDUCING them via their envy, their respect of authority/military authority (which was insanely well developed in Germans of the time), their resentment over WWI, and the economic instability.  He seems openly evil to us, but he didn’t to his contemporaries because he SEDUCED them.  He was one of them, and he knew where to push.  Yes, the evil has to be obvious to your readers – but your characters CAN be justifiably blinded.  If you find yourself thinking “he was mesmerized” see if you can do something better with it.  We should be able to feel the attraction of the villain.  (Again depending on the type and size of the story.)

4 – Your villain should always be as strong as your main character, then a bit more.  If your main character is good with swords, your villain should be good with swords, and knives, and have a concealed firearm somewhere about his person.  Bambi versus Godzilla is a great movie, if Bambi has gotten squished flat the first time, had some armor designed, has sharpened his teeth into points, and is back this time for Bambi Versus Godzilla, This Time It’s Serious.

5 – If your villain has serious enough problems to cause him to become a satisfyingly evil SOB, they can’t be solved by his realizing he’s done wrong.  You can – with a long series, and increments – bring him there in maybe ten, twenty – fifty? – books.  BUT then you have to ask yourself “how could he live with himself after that?” and “What form of crazy atonement must he undertake?”  And THOSE are satisfying plots.  BUT if you just pat your villain on the back and he breaks into tears and confesses his misdeeds, he’d best be two years old… or a minor henchman tool (even if he seemed to be the main villain up till then.  This is doable.)

6- Death before rehabilitation is something to put over your desk, to look at when dealing with villains, but if you MUST rehabilitate, kindly – PLEASE – remember that barring divine intervention (I’m not arguing that one) people don’t change in the space of a breath.  And even with divine intervention, (again, so not arguing) the changed villain will still have the characteristics that led him to the dark side.  If he was an intransigent enforcer for the villain, he’ll become the same for the hero – not necessarily a bad thing, mind, but he’ll be stiff and a bit doctrinaire.  This also means he can be led into temptation again, by the right villain-disguised-as-hero.

6 a) If you wish to give depth to your villain, remember most of us have the vices of our virtues.  Take me.  I’m driven (mostly insane.)  While this means I can work a lot, it means I can… work a lot, which means I’m not the best at my personal life and must be very grateful my husband and sons understand this particular insanity.  I can see someone whose virtue is, say, his moral rectitude deciding to eliminate a population that falls short of perfect.  And remember THAT while being true can serve as a screen to hide a lust for power.

7 – There MUST be a choice.  At some point, the villain decides to do what should have been patently evil to him FOR A REASON.  His reason doesn’t matter as much as his choice does.  HE/SHE CHOOSES TO BE EVIL.  (And hence, there must be punishment.  Which fits the crime.   If the crime is stealing cookies, killing the villain is probably over the top.)   For hereditary evil – say hereditary evil rulers – at some point they have to choose to CONTINUE evil.  Again, it should be obvious they chose it, they can’t just drift.  EVEN if the villain lies to himself about having a choice, there is always a choice, and it must be clear to the reader.

(As usual, of course there are SOME exceptions to these rules, and some are even good.  They just take exceptional ability to pull off and might only apply in one cave.  Also, your mileage may vary.  These are my beliefs on villains and evil.  You might prefer soft fuzzy evil that purrs, in which case you should meet my cat D’Artagnan.)

crossposted at Mad Genius Club

1- I am sure I walked across a similar stage once. 1981, Stow, Ohio.  I have the (my name misspelled) diploma.  How come I remember cold nothing of it, except the changing of the tassels at the end and that we threw the hats in the air in strict defiance of rules?

2- Why did none of the kids today throw hats in the air?

3- While I understand the point of making the kids feel like something important just happened – and it did, since those who were socially promoted are now not required to be babysat by the state, and those who were in actual challenging programs achieved something – MUST we have speeches on the theme of “the first day of your life” and “Some final remarks”?  Dude, if you didn’t teach the kids what they need to know for life in 12 years, let it go.  They’re not going to listen to you now.

4- Since when did my kid’s class include a large number of vampire immigrants from Terry Practchett’s Uberwald?  While none of the kids – to my chagrin – appeared to be named Margolotta Amaya Katerina Assumpta Crassina Von Uberwald or even Maledicta, there were students with FIVE given names.  What gives?

5- Thank G-d the sheer silliness of made-up names seems to be receding.  There were only half a dozen of them on the roll.  Look guys, if the way your kid will distinguish him/herself is because you gave him/her a dissonant collection of syllables never used for a name in any language, congratulations.  I believe it’s called the tyranny of low expectations.  Odd names with a base in history, mythology or something else is completely different of course.  (Says the woman who ALMOST got named Naiad Euridice except for her dad being a stick in the mud.)

6 – WHY are all the hats one size fits none, so that the girls look like they’re trying to hide in their hat, and the boys look like Goofy in Disney comics?  Is this to prepare them for the humiliations and inadequacies of adulthood?

7 – Is it wise to tell the kids to follow their passion?  Yes, yes, this is the fairly useless novelist asking, but for the love of heaven, can’t you see Rome is burning?  Or perhaps that the job market is?  Telling them it’s terrible to get up every morning to go to a job they hate is not a good idea.  I’ve done that off and on for months/years when the alternative was starving or the dole.  How about something about the dignity of working and feeding yourself, no matter how humble the occupation?  I mean their passion is fine, if they have a passion for engineering (thank you, G-d, thank you!) But what if their passion is for drawing in chalk on sidewalks, or studying the poetry of tooth paste advertising?  Following your heart into a ditch is… not the best advice.

8 – Supposing they listen to ANYTHING you say, how about telling them that life and great stuff is what happens while you’re busy with something else.  So, be busy, be good to those who depend on you, support yourself, don’t be a mooch, keep your head clear and keep working.  If you see a chance to strike for your passion, do so.  If you have a passion for an artistic endeavor, keep working at it.  BUT do so on the side.  Above all be independent, honest and responsible.  If you can also be a great artist, that’s gravy.

9 – The difference between having a boy and having a girl graduate – parents of girls were all holding bouquets of flowers.  Parents of boys wondered “If I gave him flowers, how puzzled would he look?” then giggled uncontrollably.  COOL parents of boys had cheeseburgers at the ready.

10 – AND way to make me feel old, kids, as I pick my son up and we walk away from his group, I realize they’re shouting … Hashtags at each other.  As in “Hey, Bob, Hashtag flat-cat.”  Kids these days, what will they come up with next?  On the good side the only afros were natural, and none of them were sporting bell bottoms, so the major errors of my own year have been corrected.  The future looks bright.

Update — Hey!  Get off my lawn ;)

I should write a profound post today.  You see, my younger child is graduating from high school today.

I could talk about how it was only yesterday — swear to bog — I called from the hospital to tell Robert he had a little brother and Robert wanted to know why we had Pixel-cat with us.  That’s because for the first three months of his life, Marshall sounded just like the cat.

I could talk about the amazing signs of genius he showed as a toddler (doesn’t every mother have these stories?) or whatever the heck it was he mixed at three from household chemicals, which left a crater in our backyard at our last house.  (Also a sign of genius, but the kind that, well, doesn’t end well.  First thing I knew was the fountain of dirt at second floor height.)

We could talk about his special challenges, only he’d prefer me not to and I might be dependent on him in my old age.

We could talk about annus horriblis, aka sixth grade when we eventually had to bring him home to homeschool for a year.  Or we could talk about what a joy that year was, and how if I could have found a tutor for math, I’d have continued doing it, because he’s so much fun to run along with in an intellectual race.

But it’s late, I’m tired, I was writing till late, then getting his clothes ready, because tonight he could misplace his own head.  And tomorrow, after the ceremony, I’m finishing a story (which pretty much encapsulates the last seventeen years too.)

So, I’ll write another — better — blog post if I can find time halfway through tomorrow.

For now suffice it to say that I find it rather impossible that the YOUNGER kid is leaving high school, and that I’m SURE I’m nowhere near that old.  Must be some time compression device or… something.

Congratulations to E. Marshall Hoyt and to the rest of you — catch you on the flip side.

This is not a movie review, though it’s one of my very, very few posts inspired by watching a movie.

So, I went to see the Avengers (which is SO totally Human Wave.)  For those who don’t know me very well, this is under the heading of an anomaly.  I rarely go out to the movies.  Heck, I rarely watch movies at home.  Even those that are highly recommended by friends tend to get forgotten before their theater run ends.  But we were taking Friday off as a family, so we went to see the movie…

With much trepidation on my side on whether I’d be able to stand it, we went.  Full disclosure – I fell asleep during Star Wars.  Twice.  Why?  Because by that time I was reading science fiction and the plot struck me as “cliche one meets cliche two” and I’m not visual.  Also I’ve found in recent times that movies have gone MORE visual, with cut scene to cut scene and minimal dialogue.

Another source of concern is that I hadn’t seen the lead-up, though I keep meaning to watch Iron Man, which we have.  And also that I generally don’t watch super hero movies, because…

Well, because modern super heros seem to be like Superman in Five For Fighting’s “It’s not easy to be me” lyrics, you know “I can’t stand to fly/I’m not that naive/I’m just out to find/The better part of me” all the way the incredible touchy-feely wankiness of “men weren’t meant to ride/with clouds between their knees.”

And if you’re saying “But Sarah, it’s the vulnerable side that makes a super hero interesting” … Yeah.  It’s the vulnerable/flawed side that makes everyone interesting.  But what makes them worth reading about is what they accomplish DESPITE that, not the fact that they’re faster than a speeding bullet and yet whine about being a pretty face beside a train.

Oh, I know when this came in, and I even know why. I read enough pulp to know that one gets tired of the “big muscular hero does stuff” and that is why I like the uncut version of Puppet Masters, because we see why “Sam” runs, and what he does despite his big, sundering flaw.  Somewhere along the line the “I’m going to write something totally different” took over, and you end up doing well with it, because no one is doing it… And then suddenly it’s a trend, and then it’s “the way to do things.”

The reason I hate Super Hero stories in general is this ridiculous “his powers are a great burden” and “he just wants to be normal.”  Look, children – yeah, we all know people who are very smart or (worse) very beautiful, and we know there is a dark side to it.  It’s not all beer and skittles or prom queening and flowers.  Yes, their “powers” attract as much envy and hate as they attract admiration and love.  BUT ask them…  How many would give them up?  When they say they would what they mean is NOT “I want to be dumber/uglier” it’s “I want people to accept me and the stupid backbiting to end.”  Which again is different from being super man and wishing you were made of tissue paper.

Super heros who spend the movie chewing the scenery about how unfortunate they are and JUST wake up long enough to punch out the villain in the end, make me want to throw things.  Of course, this is the fashion in story telling, right now.  We seem to have – thank heavens – got over the anti-hero craze of the seventies – even our vampires are defanged before being made heros – but we are still stuck with pop psychology and angst over being heros.

I’m glad to report that Avengers doesn’t have that.  It has the required psychological plot (TM) under the idea of team building, but that didn’t bend me out of shape, because… well… it is hard to forge a team of exceptional people.  I’ve run enough workshops with extremely talented writers, and had other such professional occasions to know that making a team of gifted people is MUCH harder than making a team of newbies, beginners or people who aren’t special in any way.

What I really liked about the movie is that even though every character is profoundly flawed, the only one who is truly angsty about it is the Hulk and – arguably – he has more reason than any of the others since his shifted form is utterly mindless or close to it.  And even though every character is profoundly flawed, they’re not, any of them, (except Hulk) throwing fits over how terrible their fate is, in having these powers.  And, oh, by the way, Loki doesn’t turn out to be the good guy all along or even to be just a young man full of high spirits who went wrong TM.  Evil is real (if a little simplistic, but then it is a super hero movie, not War and Peace) and good is good, and you know where the line is.

Being myself, I confess that Tony Stark is my favorite character, because I do like characters who don’t take themselves seriously.  (“Doth mother know thou wearest her drapes?”) Though Captain America is my second favorite, because he’s a man who does what he has to do.  And can any movie be bad that contains the line “Hulk, smash,” as instructions?

Now, this concludes the movie portion of this blog post, and it brings us back around to what is a hero.  Not a “superhero” just a hero – a hero of the sort I like to find in books, even when they’re not about heroic actions.  And this is my view of it:

1 – A hero is larger than life.  What he does and what he can do puts us in awe of him.  (Not in “aw” of him.)  This despite the fact that

2- A true hero is or should be completely human.  Running up against a hail of bullets is yawn worthy, if you’re invulnerable to bullets.  Heroes know what can happen to them, face it and

3- Do what they have to do despite knowing how much it will cost them.

4- What they have to do MIGHT be run up against a hail of bullets.  Or it might be running into a burning building to save a child – or a cat.  Or it might be working three jobs so their kids get through school with no debt.  Whatever he does, though

5- He does this without complaining, whining and angsting that would shame a thirteen year old girl, particularly when a thirteen year old girl IS a hero.  (I think Hollywood directors caught on that we like the underdog, and think every character, including the hero needs to be the underdog.  Trust me, humanizing a character does NOT mean castrating him.)

6 – The hero doesn’t always win, but when he loses, he gets back on his feet and tries again.  He doesn’t spend time thinking of giving up his super powers, just so he doesn’t have to fight again.  AND he definitely does not wander around all angsty because no one said thank you.  The hero does what he has to do, he doesn’t do what he can so he gets thank yous.

7 – I’m not saying that all heros have no internal flaws driving them.  Most of them do.  Good examples are Black Widow and Hawkeye in this movie, who have oceans of blood to pay for, and know they’ll never clear the bill.  These flaws can and should be presented, they just shouldn’t be WHAT the story is about.  The story is about the exceptionally good things heroes do.  They don’t even have to be particularly good people, they just have to do good stuff.

8 – Heroes don’t have to love people.  They do need not to be idiots.  (I will admit here that if I hear one more pseudo-profound diatribe about how we’re a cancer/infection on the Earth, there’s going to be broken crockery.  This nonsense denotes as much deep thought as saying “We’re all naked under our clothes” another sixties favorite.)  By this I mean, they might not love people in general, but they’ll love SOMEONE, or else they might not really like people, but they feel they belong to them.  Or else, they might not love people but … as compared to what?  The point is, they should be on the side of good and not go looking in the weeds for reasons to hate humanity in order to sound like post-modern-scholars (TM).

9 – The hero needs only ONE outsize quality.  That is, your hero doesn’t need super strength or super powers, or x ray vision (which always seemed to me very weird.  I mean, who stands in front of a villain and goes “I’d have your kidneys checked.”) A hero needs ONE outsize quality, and it can be something all of us have, but he has more of it.  Think Inigo Montoya in Princess Bride and PERSISTENCE.  There’s a reason he’s one of sf/f’s favorite characters and totally steals that movie.  (And the lady or gentleman in the back who is giggling over “outsize quality,” stop it, or I shall throw a dead fish at you.)

10 – The hero needs to do the heroing.  This involves a certain moral quality. It is impossible for us, in this day and age of multiculturalism and “everyone has his reasons” to actually say that without cringing.  But heroes have moral certainty.  Look, you might or might not be for the death penalty, but Inigo’s certainty he should kill the six fingered man makes us follow him and cheer him.  It’s not our moral certainty.  It’s his.  And the fact that the six-fingered man grossly needs killing just makes it perfect.  You’re the writer.  You’re in control.  You can make villains who need to be destroyed and actions that must be stopped.  Like, how many of you will stop on the way to rescue a puppy from being put in a blender to go “well, everyone has his reasons.  I need the villain’s take on this?”

But Sarah, you say, I want my heroes and my villains to be done in middle-grades, in fifty shades of gray as it were.  I want to be realistic and life-like.

Oh, please, do go ahead.  You will probably win several prizes.  I just won’t read you.  And probably there are a few people who feel like me.  I have no objection to THAT market being served, I’m just jazzed to see storytelling come around to where there is some of the stuff I like and where a blockbuster movie unashamedly does the Human Wave.

When I was a new writer, writing my very first book, my husband was very impressed by a scene in which a slave says three lines and immediately has a personality and completely steals the chapter.

It was in a way an harbinger of things to come, but it still makes me wonder if he was right that it was a sign I’d be a great author.  I wonder, because knowing when to use cliches in the right place is incredibly useful in creating a novel and getting subtext to the reader without adding YET another subplot to your book.

This is particularly important as the age of Indie publishing dawns.  (It looks like a dawn to me.  Of course, it could be a raging forest fire in the horizon.)  Why, because we’ve determined – we being those of us who buy and observe ebooks and their marketing – that people will pay $4.99 for fifty thousand words.  They will also pay 4.99 for 100,000 words and 4.99 for 150,000 words.

Why this is, I don’t know, but there seems to be a hard set price at around $5 that people don’t like going over.  If you have a big name, or if it’s a sequel to a book with a lot of readers, they might go as high as $6.99, but at that point, as far as I can tell, you’re losing more in readers than the increased share of the price will bring in.  From 50k words on down to 20k words there are price breaks along the way, hitting at 20k (though you can get away with 11k to 15k if it’s really good) at 2.99, and 30 to 35k words at 3.99.   Of course, this all varies wildly with “book that’s part of a series” and “Popular characters” but this is the way to bet.

Oh, I have some idea as to why the different formats support different sizes.  If I remember the goatgaggers came about because paperbacks were going to be 8.99 anyway, even for small ones (having to do with requirements for half recycled paper in the books.  How do you know recycled paper is a bad idea?  Because recycling it costs more and causes more damage to the environment than just harvesting the trees that are grown for paper – no, boys and girls, no one is cutting down old growth forests for pulp.  Yes, of course you thought they did.  We all did.  Keep that mind.  It’s important later.  Politicians know that too, this is why they make the grand gestures that actually make things worse.  They are masters of the cliche) then why not charge a couple bucks extra, but make the book two and a half times as large.  VISIBLY larger, and therefore speaking to that back part of the human brain that says “more for the money.”

In ebooks, you don’t see that.  You see a description that either sounds interesting or not, and a price.  If the price is 7.99 or 8.99, that description had best be fantastic.  The bar to cross is much higher.  

Yes, if you buy a book and it turns out to be only 50 pages, you get upset.  I have, when romance writers charge 2.99 for their short stories.  BUT speaking as a reader, if it’s a hundred pages or more, I’m willing to go up to 3.99 or thereabouts.  And if it reads as substantial as Agatha Christie, well, 4.99 is about right.  (And I have to argue with myself a lot less to get it.  Treacherous is the human brain and all that.  Two books at 50k words a piece at 4.99 are the same as a 150k book at 9.99 – but that’s not what it FEELS like.)

As a writer with limited time, the strategy for maximizing money is obvious – one should return to the techniques of the pulps and write shorter books.  It is a fact modern readers fail to appreciate that most of the Agatha Christie books, most of the Rex Stout books, the Heinlein books pre- 70s and a lot of others maxed out at about 60k words.  This was the novel in the times novels were wildly popular.  It was also something that could be consumed in about an hour, by a fast reader.  (I’m not sure if this had anything to do with their popularity, but I’m throwing it out there.)

The problem is that I came into the field when the novel had come to mean 100k or so words.  This length became hard and fast in my brain.  Impossible to dislodge even over the first five years in my career when the goatgagger of 220 to 250k words became all the rage.  The one goatgagger I tried to write suffered from subplots that had little to do with the main plot.  Of course so did a lot of the bestsellers, but that is no excuse.

The sad thing though is that of right now, I can see writing a goatgagger more easily than a 50k story.  A goatgagger could be a trilogy published as a single book.  A 50k story, however, requires learning a new way of writing.  And I’m trying to learn it in experiments you’ll probably never see.  (This is, right now my second job, trying to retool for the indie market.)

Yes, I could write it as an episodic novel but each of the episodes requires the same techniques as a shorter novel, to fully work.

Okay, Sarah, you’ve convinced us.  Small is the new massive and this has something to do with pulp.  BUT what does that have to do with cliches?

Go and read any Harlequin from the seventies and eighties when they held the length at around 50k.  It is almost exclusively cliches.  (There was a joke, for a while, around writers’ email lists that when you wrote your first romance you’d get a letter from the “dark haired virgin” – this was a woman who sent a letter to every new romance writer begging for a heroine who was a dark haired virgin.  I don’t know how much of that is apocryphal or if she still does it, I never wrote an official romance.)

The joke/story worked, because a dark haired virgin was hard to find.  The innocent virgin was usually a blond, while the experienced mistress/woman of bad repute was dark haired.  Why?  Well, for goodness sakes, because that cliche starts with the picture books.  (And Pratchett had delightful fun with it in I Shall Wear Midnight.) And the books were short. You had to get your bang as fast as possible.  You didn’t have time to fight pre-conceived notions.

When writing short, what I did in that very first book, making what should be a secondary character with a walk-on part become a full fledged individual is baaaaad.  Well, it’s bad for my pocket book and my writing speed.  Why?  Because if I make a character live and breathe in three sentences, the reader (see yesterday’s post on foreshadowing) expects him to be part of a major subplot, with his own growth line.  And that means the book SWELLS up, like one of those sponge dinosaurs thrown in a glass of water.

I’m happy to report I have mustered that much.  My walk-ons are now fully walk-ons and I let my brain pick up cliche-1 or cliche-2 out of the back regions.  In case you have not noticed – have you? – all my hostlers tend to be fat and jovial.  That’s because the name is attached to the (British) Robin Hood series which aired in Portugal in the late seventies.  Hostlers are fat, jovial and often red faced.   Going against that cliche in my own head means I’d give the so-and-so’s a chance to grow and become individuals and then you’d have the tale of the hostler with the unfaithful wife and the incurable disease.  And then at the end I’d need to tie his growth to the main story and next thing you know, people are sending me letters begging for a hostler series.

The devil is in the secondary characters, and in keeping them properly secondary.  If I’m going to spend a ton of time in someone else’s head, then by gum and golly, they’re going to be people.  I can’t help it.  It’s like a disease.  My subconscious starts spending a lot of time around a critter’s head, and next thing I know the critter has a mother, a wife, two sisters, a cat he loved in childhood and  OCCASIONALLY searing memories of something or other from childhood.  I can’t help it.  It just happens.

This is why Witchfinder which was planned to be 90k words or thereabouts, is now becoming something that will end at around 120 or 150k words.  It was supposed to be a mostly Seraphim book – I have the outline, I SWEAR – but not only has his half-brother/valet developed a plot line line of his own (bursting out of his “clever servant” cliche jacket) but now his little sister is developing her own too which will involve extraordinary gifts and a star crossed love, and his little brother though a late comer will, I swear, steal the show just to upset me.  And don’t get me started on his father who is supposed to be decently dead.  (Flash – Dukes don’t know their place.  Oh, wait.)

And please, don’t tell me to keep the books first person there.  Do you guys know how many letters I got after Darkship Thieves asking me for novels featuring Nat and – I swear I’m not making this up – Fuse?  FUSE!  And of course there will be novels featuring them, because the moment I read that, my subconscious goes “oooo” gets the jump on the conscious, clobbers it on the head and starts spinning stories.

So, how do I feel about this?  I don’t know.  Part of me resents the fact that I can’t write 50 thousand word novels when they sell as well or better than longer ones.  Look, this is the thing…  I know the gentleman who visited to defend non-fiction writers talked about my art.  (Rolls eyes.)  Which is a fundamental misunderstanding of what I’m trying to do.

Is my writing art?  Don’t know.  Don’t care.  To me art is that extra dimension, when breath from the gods blows upon the book and it lives.  It’s not something I can invoke at will, particularly when I MAKE MY LIVING FROM THIS and must finish books in time to pay tuition or get the car repaired even while sick, angry, worried, or other mind-impairing things.  What I CAN and try to do is write the best book I can in a way that it will sell the most.

But… but… but…  But writing 50 thousand word books involves working mostly in cliches.  And the problem with cliches is that they are so often wrong.  At best they’re a radical simplification.  At worst, they are an outright lie.  Take the “all virgins are blondes.”  I distinctly remember being a virgin, and I was dark haired.  Worse, I had streaks of red in my hair.  Which means I should have been the local slut.  Now, yes, anyone thinking they have to be sluts because they’re dark haired is insane, but that’s because it’s a cliche that ALL of us know it’s wrong, pretty much.  So the cliche is silly, but it doesn’t hurt anyone.

Other cliches do.  Though Ric was wrong to assume I was using the cliche of the “tortured homosexual” – (mostly because these two people are well… far from perfect people, and both are mostly victims of themselves regardless of their society and its issues and also because though ONE of them is at the center of the solution to the book, the solution has to do with his birth, not his orientation.) BUT oh, heavens, the cliche exists.  It exists to the point of calling up widespread prejudice that doesn’t exist in most places, anymore for the purpose of serving the plot, giving people the impression ALL gay people are beat up every other day and twice on Sunday, while walking to the convenience store for milk, in your average suburb.  (The same applies to “tortured person of color” and “tortured immigrant” and “tortured minority of some description” – the end result being that book my kids had to read in school about the pagan, handicapped, lesbian Latina who can never do anything, because everyone victimizes her .) Or the cliche about all evil in the world coming from truly bizarre sexual wishes suppressed (or expressed.)  There’s this television mystery series, which I’m actually enjoying around the edges, (I’m watching it free with Amazon prime, and I think it’s a British series) but my husband and I joke the solution to the mystery is always kinkier and kinkier sex.  We’ve taken to guessing how bizarre the sexual act at the bottom of it will be next time.  We’ve now had homosexuality between married people, middle aged transvestite, incest, swinging and more incest.  I understand the same thing applies to the “new” Miss Marple TV series, where they’ve defaulted to all sorts of sexual stuff as the reason for the murders, etc. as though people had NO OTHER impulses or reasons to do things.   It’s like their answer for everything is “Sex” which of course is cliche from the seventies.  

And this cliche brings my objection to “cliches” to the fore – no matter how useful they are.  Using “sex” as the answer for everything is not only wrong, it can be harmful.  It makes young people think sexual orientation or what anyone does in bed or even what they WANT to do in bed matters much more than it does and determines people’s moral character all along the line (which is bad for both sides of the debate).  It also propagates the idea there’s no escape.  If you have a truly depraved instinct — say an attraction to clown noses — you can give in to it and let it ruin your life, or not give in to it and go insane.

Of course, some sexual impulses, judged under the “this is bad for a lot of other people” or “this is causing suffering to innocent creatures for the sake of pleasure” are PLAIN wrong, (like crushing small cute animals.  ick.  Or pedophilia.)  And impulses that aren’t wrong (including good old heterosexual desire can be PLAIN wrong in CERTAIN circumstances and in certain places.)  And of course you can control yourself without going insane.  Most of us do.  EVERY DAY.  But since it’s not something people talk about that much, it’s easy to have the idea propagate that if you really HAVE to mate with cabbages and DON’T give in to it, and give in to it in a public and noisy manner, you’re going to start killing the neighbors and stuffing them into garbage bags.  (Yes, some people do.  Those people tend to have OTHER issues too. For the record, Splendor in The Grass is full of sh*t.  If she couldn’t handle NOT having sex without going insane, she was certainly not ready to HAVE sex.)  If your sexual bend runs towards live chickens, it’s probably better if you repress it.  Dead chickens?  Well, keep it to yourself buddy.  Keep it to yourself with the door locked and the windows down.  Your mind should still be in control of your body no matter how many modern novels say we have to give in or become mass murderers.  Or to allude to Rex Stout’s masterly summation, there’s more to being humans – and to caring, and to having adventures, and, yes, even to committing murder – than the appetites we share with dogs.

But the idea that sex is at the bottom of everything is a cliche – and one easy to default to, because so much of the “serious” TV and movies we see do.  Freud, though no longer taken seriously, has percolated through our entire society.  Cheap pop psychology makes you sound “deep”  (Fortunately I’m virtually immune to TV, unless I’m ironing, and I NEVER read “serious” literature. :-P I have an old college injury.  It only hurts when I read literature.  Of course, it is a problem too, because I don’t know what readers expect.  And yes, that is bad.)

Mostly what I tend to do, because the same thing happens to me with “niche cliches” as happens to secondary characters is take the cliche, start off with it, then spin it around and rearrange it so its own mother wouldn’t recognize it.

Take, for instance the cliche of the cruel father, so useful in fat fantasies of the seventies and eighties that featured a girl MC.  People starting Darkship Thieves would be excused for thinking I’m going that way and pounding on the patriarchal society, etc.  Only… that’s not *precisely* the point.  There are reasons for the cruel father, and he’d be (has been/and others are) just as cruel to a boy.  Because my mind can’t leave cliches alone.

Is there a bit of pride in that?  Well, yes, but only in the same way I’ll tell you that I can’t sing – or rather, that I sing so badly I could clear packed buses at rush hour.  If you’re blessed with this sort of thing, you might as well take pride in it, because it ain’t going away.

BUT again, it will cause a problem with writing shorter.  A serious problem.  On the other hand, using cliches CAN – though it isn’t necessarily needed, not in all of them – become poisonous and lies that can – eventually – infect the whole society.  On the one hand I write to make money.  On the other hand, I have to wake up with myself and look in the mirror, because otherwise I’ll probably put my toothbrush in my eye.

The electronic drawing programs I use have “tips” that you can put on the “airbrush” – sky tips, and rose tips and…  So that if you’re drawing a bunch of fiddly stuff that’s not important in the big picture, you don’t have to slave over it.  Very useful.  In the same way I tend to think of cliches as a “cliche tip” – if you have a walk in character, why give him the complex back story and the searing experience with the cat and the three men dressed in clown suits?  On the other hand, if you have a cliche character in a more substantial position, you have to look t it very carefully and wonder whether you’re propagating a lie that does actually have consequences.  The thing is, you have to be fully aware deviating from the herd in that one will cost you time and money and it’s doubtful it will gain you that many more fans, at least for a while – so you should only do it if you ABSOLUTELY have to… like, if you can’t look at yourself in the morning if you don’t.

Lately I’ve found that those “Background tips” on the drawing brush are less convincing and more “fakey” than if I just use some quick techniques to do the background in a way that suggests it but doesn’t fully show it.  I’m not absolutely sure if that’s a metaphor for writing or not.  All I know is that this is going to require learning a lot of new techniques.

Note that I’m giving away stuff at Mad Genius Club.

Also, Mike Kabongo has a post tangentially related to this – in the sense of finding “new” stuff to read which is NOT a cliche.

For the daily dose of controversy, go here.  I’m talking about other stuff today.

This is a post about how to foreshadow in a book.  It is of course a post for writers, but also for readers.  Sometimes being aware of the foreshadowing is a delight.  I confess I don’t usually do it first read through, when I’m like “yay, story.”  BUT on second read, seeing how beautiful the structure is supporting the tent can help appreciate the work.

I will warn you I am no expert.  I only discovered foreshadowing after selling FOUR books.  Does this mean I was doing none of it?  Well, no, it doesn’t.  I’ve read so much – books and stories have always been part of my life, even if the earliest reading I remember is comic books.  What I mean is, I absorbed some of what to do through the skin, without thinking about it.

[CACS asked how I could have a degree in literature without learning about foreshadowing.  Very easily.  First you have to account for different cultures.  I don’t know HOW Portuguese novels are structured, but I know it’s different from Anglophonic novels.  For one, they read far more leisurely and unstructured to me.  Now, we studied English and German and French novels, too, but if a concept does not exist in your own literature, you’ll be blind to it in other literatures.  OTOH it’s entirely possible that foreshadowing is well known in Portugal and I never heard of it.  Honestly, having gone into highschool in 75 (highschool in Portugal starts with 7th grade) and graduating in 81, I got the first wave of what we’ll call ex-hippie (and sometimes not ex) teachers.  College was more mixed, because some of my literature professors were older, but they too were under the tyranny of the hip.  Just like art was about throwing us at a wall with paint and telling us to express ourselves, we were encouraged to analyze literature anyway we wanted to, with bonus points for Marxist.  Just like I now take arts courses to learn about stuff like perspective and shading, I had to unlearn almost anything I thought I knew about literature, in order to write readable books.]

Anyway, I thought – feel free to laugh here – that things were just supposed to happen in books.  In the same way I like surprise endings, I thought that ALL plot developments should be surprises, the more surprise the better.  This resulted in some reviews for my first published books, saying the books had no plot.  This is silly, because they do.  What happens HAS to happen, logically.  It’s just that I didn’t signal it enough in advance and from the readers’ perspective it just “happens.”  At that, my first published books have SOME structure that’s visible to readers, in the form of leaning on older fairytales.  The great Minoan saga suffers, most of all, from a complete lack of foreshadowing (yes, I DID think I was being clever) which means walls fal on the character.  From the reader’s perspective, this character is just cursed, and he can’t walk past a wall without it’s falling onto it.  (A quick note on plotting here – your character should suffer mostly from things he did himself.  While the eternal victim character – Jane Eyre, or the beginning of Harry Potter – grabs you, if the character doesn’t start having some control over his destiny and soon, you’ll either lose readers or win a Nobel Prize, depending on who your victim is.)  This is why the great Minoan saga MUST be rewritten, even IF I bring it out myself.

And then within the space of a month, both Dave Freer and Toni Weisskopft informed me when I said something like “I know, my plotting sucks” (which I’d told other professionals before and they never disabused me) “No, your plotting is fine, but you have no clue how to foreshadow.”  (Boy, were they right.  I’m looking at novellas I wrote before that, and OUCH.  Those too are being rewritten.  The short stories “swim” better because very short.)

They both then left me to sink or swim, (and in Dave’s case we ALL know there are sharks in the waters he swims in!) They both recommended I read Georgette Heyer as an example, though.  (This started my downfall into reading icky, icky romance.  Actually reading ANY romance doesn’t hurt, if you haven’t read it before.  Or any genre you don’t normally read.  You see the structure better if the idea is unfamiliar.)

The first time I foreshadowed I was convinced – CONVINCED – that people would tell me I’d ruined the book; that they knew all the plot in the first three pages, that they didn’t like it.

Instead, that book, Draw One In The Dark, though it had a horrible cover in hard cover, and therefore negligible numbers, was the beginning of my building my fandom.  (It’s available at Baen’s Webscriptions at a reasonable price, too AND with the not-horrible mmpb cover.)

Foreshadowing is one of those things you have to learn by trial and error, but from the height of my eight years of doing it, let me tell you what I’ve learned so far.

1- Tell the readers what the book IS in the first few pages.  By which I don’t mean your character should stop and say “Welcome to my world, this is a sf/adventure/with dragons.”  I mean that the major elements that shape genre or sub-genre should be there.  PARTICULARLY now that covers are often thumbnails and you decide to purchase on the first few pages.  If I think I’m reading quest fantasy and then they arrive at the spaceport I’m going to be jarred at least, and throw the book against the wall at worst.

But SARAH, you say – stop whining, kid – my book doesn’t start at a place that tells you what it is.  You see, my character is in this perfectly normal coffee shop, and then this magician comes in…  (Noted, coffee + magic equals AWESOME, but–) and the world is perfectly normal till then.  Yeah.  Okay fine.  BUT there are ways to give clues.  If your character knows magic exists, give him a thought about oh, fixing his own coffee maker with magic.  If he doesn’t, have him see something and go “Impossible.  There’s no such thing as magic.”  This can be very short and throw away, but it’s enough to let the reader know – even if at a subconscious level – that magic is part of this novel.

This is more important the more out of the ordinary your book is.  So if you’re writing a science fantasy or a techno romance, you need to signal more and earlier.  People tend to default to book-patterns they know.  If you don’t signal, they’ll assume your book is a standard whatever they read last.

2- For major plot points ahead, signal three times.

Say your character is going to suddenly and explosively turn into a dragon when cornered.  You should have this signaled ahead, in different ways – he remembers doing it at some point, and leveling the area (weak); he is afraid of doing it (stronger, but still weak); he goes halfway to changing and pulls back (stronger.)

It needs three times because your readers might not notice the first, and think the second is accidental.

3 – For minor plot points, you can foreshadow less, or just weakly.  Say by mentioning a few times, in passing, through different characters that red hats attract dragons.

4 – Take what you think is excessive signaling ahead, then amp it to double.  Remember, you know the book, so to you it feels like being beat over the head.  It doesn’t to a reader because they don’t KNOW what you’re trying to do.  (Which is rather the point.)  Objects in the writer’s mind are larger than they appear to the reader.  Remember that.

For those going traditional publishing, copy editors are the enemies of this process.  They don’t seem to GET that they’re doing this professionally and line by line, and the reader doesn’t read like that, so they’ll tell you things like “you already told us that!”  This is why G-d gave you a STET stamp (or if you’re me, you had it made at a local shop.)  Use it.  Try to make sure you didn’t repeat the words, though, particularly in different characters’ mouths, because readers DO get THAT.

5 – If you’re a pantser or an occasional pantser, or a pantser in details (which I am, sometimes) don’t go in with a heavy hand in revision and ASSUME you didn’t foreshadow.  I seem to be foreshadowing behind my own back.  Take the whole child prostitution thing in Witchfinder – which, ick, ick, ick, I wouldn’t consciously put in, but my subconscious THINKS must be in there – it surprised me as coming out of nowhere, but when I read back over it, it is foreshadowed.  This has happened to me A TON of times, with various books.  So, read first.  The foreshadowing might ALREADY be there.

6- OTOH when revising, make sure you remove accidental foreshadowing. I.e. Foreshadowing for things that aren’t in the book/won’t happen/are just plain weird. Take the beginning of Death Of The Musketeer.  I have – I think I’ve admitted this – a crush on Athos.  When writing that book, the first time I got to play with Athos in my own prose, I forgot I was in D’Artagnan’s mind, and described Athos… rather… lovingly.  This was the author having fun, but when I revised, it read like signage for guy on guy romance, if not guy on guy porn.  I deleted six pages, in utter horror at my slip-up.  (No.  You can’t have them.  Geesh.  You guys just want to laugh at me.)  A lost of accidental foreshadowing isn’t that in your face, and you might miss it.  Say you mention your character is an excellent rider, just because you want to give him ALL virtues.  If this is done early, the reader will expect… horsemanship to matter.  (If it’s later in the novel, they might get you’re just saying he’s “Wonnerful.”) Unless horsemanship matters, take it out.

Of course, the BEST way to test your learning of these techniques is beta readers you can trust.  If this IS what you’re testing, you might ask them to write on the margins (or make a note) at certain points in the book of what they think the book is about and where it’s going.

Another good way is to write fanfic.  At least at the Derbyshire Writers’ Guild, you get a lot of comments, and from the comments – where people ALWAYS speculate on what will happen next – you can judge how your signaling is.

Good luck, and may you learn to cast long shadows.

I apologize in advance to anyone this chapter might shock.  My only excuse is that I didn’t even know half of this.  (And no, don’t even bother to ask how I could not have known.  I just didn’t.)

 

*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. *

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

 

The Coil Winds

“I helped find you,” Marlon Elfborn said.

Nell had got coffee, because she knew – both because Antoine had told her, and because Seraphim had confirmed it – that coffee was good for restoring damaged magic.  Some people believed the only way magicians could survive on Earth was through vast infusions of coffee and coffee shops were always a good place to find magicians porting between dimmensions, stopping on Earth for a few hours or a few days.

Elfborn was holding his cup between both hands, with the sort of clenched-fist grip normally reserved for the proverbial straw and the drowning man.  He took it black, and he’d drained almost the whole cup, which was fine, since she’d brought the pot down.  What was interesting, as far as she was concerned, was that Gabriel Penn had gone to sit gingerly next to him, and was – as far as it was possible to tell from the outside – monitoring Elfborn’s magical power.  There was that odd, analytical look as he stared at Marlon’s magic through half closed eyes.

It seemed for a moment, staring at Penn, that Nell discerned something else in those eyes, but … In Avalon?  Besides, what she’d heard from Seraphim about Elfborn’s character…  It seemed hardly likely, though she’d come to believe that people did the most stupid and out of character things when it came to their private lives.

Gabriel Penn glared at her, as though he could read her thoughts, and she cleared her throat and looked back at Marlon, who was looking at her, with the sort of unfocused look of one not fully attuned to his surroundings.

“You… helped find me?  What does that mean?”

Marlon shifted the cup, so the fingers of his right hand curled around the handle.  The left went up and raked at his hair.  He darted a furtive look at Gabriel Penn, then looked at his coffee.  “When Gab– When Mr. Penn…  That is…  He should not have–” He paused and seemed to collect himself.  “When Mr. Penn discovered the reanimated corpse of my friend in my attic and… and was alarmed enough to… to… to let his– That is…  When he let his Grace know–”

Seraphim snorted.  He mumbled something that sounded like “if coming to my door in abject terror didn’t let me know, nothing would.”

But Gabriel put a hand out and grabbed Seraphim’s arm and Elfborn seemed to ignore the interruption and went on, “And his Grace laid information against me on two capital crimes, I had to disappear.  I had to disappear fast.  Contrary to popular belief, magic professors that Cambridge… No.  Magic professors whose whole background is a foundling home, aren’t paid princely salaries.  We are- I was given a place to live and fifty pounds a year.  It was not held against me if I tutored on the side to make ends meet, which I did.”

Again Seraphim snorted, and Nell had the impression that Gabriel glared at him and squeezed his arm harder, but she didn’t look at them.  Instead she was looking at Elfborn in near horror.  While house servants made considerably less than fifty pounds a year, they got not only a place to live, but also food and clothing and often used clothing or other side benefits that could be sold.  But a governess might make a hundred pounds a year, and she too got not just a place to live but food and at least some furnishings and other benefits including – as she had found in Avalon – the not inconsiderable one of – in most decent households – coal for heating.

To live on fifty pounds a year, even with lodgings paid for, support the state of a gentleman which would be expected of a professor, and buy the necessaries of his profession, including the extremely expensive tomes on magic research would have…  Been well nigh impossible, even with tutoring on the side.  She knew what tutoring paid – she’d known people who had done it.  It was near to nothing.  The thought that Cambridge, whose “regular” professors got paid quite decently, tood advantage of people whose tainted blood made them less than equal in society made her stomach clench.  “Yes?” she said, trying to keep her voice indifferent.  “I fail to see why you’d need money to escape.  Magic yes, but–”

“Oh, magic too,” Marlon said.  “The police are not completely stupid, you know, no matter what popular fiction shows, and they do have some very competent magicians on staff.  They would have found me if all I’d done was throw a veil over my magic.  I needed to… I needed to go between-times,” he said, as if braving himself.  “Between places.  The sort of thing you read about in fairytales, where the door is only there if you’re looking for it.  As for money,” he shrugged.  “A magician in hiding still has to eat.  I suppose if I’d grown up anywhere where one lays snares or hunts I could have done that, though I hear one can’t live on rabbit without starving.  Or I could maybe have kept chickens, or something.  But I grew up in a foundling home, in London.  And I never learned to hunt.  I needed large enough money that I could… buy food.  For years.  For however long… for as long as need.”

“But,” Nell said.  “Surely necromancy pays well?”  She’d heard rumors of fortunes paid for such illegal magic.  “If you’re a necromancer–”

“He is not.  It was accidental.  He raised Gypson Haiden through a resurrection spell applied too late.  Stop glaring Seraphim, I believe him.”

“Of course you do, you’re very eager to believe–”

“Shut up, both of you,” Nell said, reflecting only later that she’d ordered a duke around as though he were an unruly school boy.  And he hadn’t complained.  Oh, very well, then.  She might grow to like this princessing thing.  “Mr. Elfborne, I still don’t understand it.  Oh, I understand your needing money, but you say until as though it would have an end.”

He shrugged, “Oh, it would.  But it might be ten or twenty years in the future.  You see, they put an embargo on my leaving the world.  I couldn’t port out.  I had to wait–” He paused and his eyes almost crossed.  “I’m out of the world.  They can’t have removed the embargo.  The minimum time is ten years.  They can’t have done it.”

“No,” it was Gabriel, assuredly.

“So…  When we were ported out violently, it must be … someone with the keys…”

“That much has been obvious for a while,” Seraphim said.  “Now, if you would answer Her Royal Highness’s implied question about whom you found her for, perhaps we can find out who ported us here.”

Marlon’s hand went up and made a worse mess of his hair, and he took a sip of his cup, only to find it was empty.  Nell held his wrist to keep the cup in place, and poured coffee for him.  He took a sip, then sighed.  “It might be them.  I always thought it was them.  I don’t know how they found I was in distress, but of course, I suppose they keep track of those of us like Gabriel and myself in your world, and from one or the other of us, they must have picked up my bind.”  He looked up at their blank looks.  “Fairyland, of course.  They sent envoys to my house, in between the time Gabriel left and before …  And before the law arrived, while I was hoping…  While I was convincing myself Gabriel would come back and I could expl–”

“You set a compulsion on him, did you not, you filthy bastard?” Seraphim asked.  “It only activated now.  I should–”

“Enough, Duke, he–”

“Compulsion?”  Elfborn blinked at Seraphim as though he’d said a foreign word.  “No.  I just hoped he would come back.  I thought if he car– I thought he’d come to his senses and come back and I could explain.”

“An animated corpse in your closet, really?  You could explain?”

Elfborn gave a short, hollow crack that might have been an attempt at laugh.  “I could try.  But I never got the chance, as the next person at my door was your Grace, challenging me for a duel and informing me you’d set the law on me. But before you came, there were envoys from fairyland.  They offered me a place already turned in the magical way that made it hard to find and ten thousand pounds– As I said, I didn’t know how they found I needed help, but my need was desperate enough that I took it.”

“I went to my mother before I went to Seraphim,” Gabriel said, not looking at Elfborne.

“Penny!” from Seraphim echoed, in tones of great shock.  “Your mother?”

Strangely this made Elfborne smile at Gabriel and shake his head, his eyes amused.  “You really were past thinking, were you not?”

“Well–” Gabriel said.  “If you’d told me– If you’d explained– As it was I thought everything…  Everything I’d thought you to be was a lie, and possibly that you intended to kill me and keep me…  I thought…”  A red tide swept upwards through his skin giving him the appearance of glowing red from within.  “One reads of such things.  Of people who… of people who are only…  Interested when someone is… that is, reanimated.  It’s one of the reasons it’s illegal, and yet there are rings of them that they catch sometimes.”

“You thought I’d kill you and reanimate you for sexual purposes?” Elborne asked, and his voice sounded shocked but as though he were on the verge of laughing.

Which didn’t last long, as Seraphim grabbed him by the front of his shirt and half-lifted him from the sofa.  “You will not speak of such things in front of her Highness.  You will remember your company and you will–”

“Let him go,” Nell said, and was shocked to see herself obeyed instantly.  She could really grow to like this princessing.  Unfortunately, she was almost sure there were drawbacks.  She sighed and turned to Seraphim who managed to look both embarrassed and vaguely confused about why he should be embarrassed.  “Your Grace.  I grew up on Earth.  You have seen, and read enough of our entertainment since you’ve been here to know I will not swoon at the mention of sexual practices no matter how vile.  I hadn’t thought of it, but of course, in a world where necromancy is possible there will be a sex trade for reanimated corpses – and yes, I consider that absolutely vile.  But it won’t make me swoon.” Something had formed in her mind.  It wasn’t a suspicion, but more like a sudden falling of a jigsaw puzzle into place.  It was as though a hundred half-seen looks, a hundred glimpses of expressions, a hundred half seen gestures had come together in that moment.  She took a deep breath, aware she was going to poke her nose into a can of worms.  But it had to be done, she thought, or the three of them were going to continue talking around things, and Seraphim would keep erupting at the worst times, trying to protect her, and making it impossible for her to piece together what Elfborn knew.

“You said two capital crimes,” she said, and looked at Elfborn.  “I am not fully aware of your laws, but I know that in our time, when society was close to yours homosexuality was a capital crime, though rarely enforced and never for people of high birth.”

“I’m not of high birth,” Elfborn said.

“So you and…” she glanced at Gabriel Penn who was looking like he’d lost the power of speech.  Also, like he wold presently have a heart attack.  She hoped Elfborn would be quicker with a resurrection spell if that happened.  “And Mr. Penn were lovers?”

The room went wild.  She’d half expected it would.  The thing she didn’t expect is that it would be all caused by Seraphim, because the other two were completely speechless.  Elfborn managed something that might have been a nod; Gabriel Penn had covered his face.  BUT the duke made up for it in triplicate, by jumping up and yelling at her, at the two other men, at – possibly – the walls of the room.  She couldn’t make much sense of his yelling, but the gist of it, as far as she could tell, was that Gabriel didn’t know what he was doing; that at nineteen he’d been underage; that Elfborn had used compulsion and magical tricks; that he was a more powerful magician than anyone else on Avalon, just about, and that he had no morals, as he’d proven by reanimating his dead lover and keeping him around; and that Seraphim would put a bullet in his head and soon.  At which point Nell screamed for Seraphim to shut up.  And it was absolutely ineffective, showing that there were limits to the princessing powers.

And then Gabriel spoke, very quietly, and Seraphim stopped, suddenly, and looked at Gabriel as though he’d grown a second head.  “He didn’t use compulsion, Seraphim.  I know, because I did.”

There was a long silence, and the Duke of Darkwater swayed slightly on his feet.  “You what?”

“I used compulsion, Seraphim.  It was a stupid thing to do but I was very young and I knew nothing of life outside Darkwater…  Not really, not as an adult.  But I knew THAT.  How do you think I survived after my mother kicked me out and our father found us?”

“You…”

“I found gentlemen of certain tastes were willing to pay for a comely half-elf child.  Yes, I know what is wrong with them.  Yes, I agree with you that those gentlemen deserve death – or at least …  No one should have to do that when they’re only a child and can’t understand any of it.  On the other hand, without it, I’d have died of starvation.  Crossing sweeping doesn’t pay that much.”

“But–” Seraphim dropped back onto the chair by the table, next to Nell’s.  “But… you never told me.”

“You were younger than I.  And besides, there are things one doesn’t talk about.  I was… just glad to be at Darkwater, and to have enough food, and not to have to… not to have to do that.”

“Oh.  Did father–”

“Of course.  When he found me he knew.  It was rumors that led him to me, and he knew how I’d been living.  He was shocked and… it overcame his reluctance to bring his half-elf child into the house.”

“Did he tell you not to speak of it?”

“No.  He…  He let me speak of it to him, for a while.  I had to.  You don’t understand, I think.  If it’s possible to have scars on one’s mind or perhaps one’s soul–” He shrugged.  “I had to talk to someone, but it was hard to.  It was easier to Father, because he already knew.  I think that’s when I came to love him as a father.  Before that, he was just…  A vague figure.  And of course my mother said horrible things of him.”

“But after that…”  Seraphim looked from Gabriel to Elfborn.  “How could you–”  

“For a long time, I thought I’d never want to do that – with anyone.  When I got old enough that the scullery maid tried to show–” He coughed.  “That is, when girls our age started showing an interest, despite my elf blood, I thought I’d been too wounded to ever feel that for anyone.  I didn’t even really like to be touched.  I tolerated it from you and Father, but I didn’t like it.  But then…” He cast a look from beneath lowered lashes towards Marlon Elfborne.  “We became friends.  Both of us had elf blood, and…”  He shrugged again.  “We had a similar sense of humor.  And around him I didn’t feel like he was cringing, afraid of what my magic might do at any minute.  I–” The blush came again, dark red, and Nell wondered if the duke also blushed like that.  She must find an occasion to test it.  “I fell in love.  But he was…  He didn’t seem to care.  So… I used a compulsion.”

“It wasn’t that,” Marlon said.  “It was just… Haiden was the one person I could trust.  After he died…”  He shrugged.  “And since I didn’t have the courage to destroy his corpse, I felt like I was too tainted to–” He paused as though something registered.  “You used compulsion?”

“Only the first time,” Gabriel put his hands up.  “Only the first time, I swear.”

“You DO know that’s legal rape, right?” Elfborn’s eyes danced with amusement.  “Three capital crimes.  Only one is yours, princeling.”

“He was underage!” Seraphim said, in the sulky tone of someone who has a feeling he’s losing an argument.

“Right,” Nell said.  “Now that this is out in the open, and that the duke of Darkwater doesn’t have to protect my ears from sullying–”

“You’re very jaded, Madame,” he said, disapprovingly.

“Rather,” she answered drily.  “But let me ask the important question – who came to your door?  And why did they want to find me?  You said people from fairyland?”

“The centaurs,” Elfborn said.  “And they wanted to bring you back to Avalon.  I didn’t see any harm in that.”

Any of you who has written anything they own outright — whether educational, travel, series of blog posts, epigrams, poems (You’ll see mine when you pry them from my cold dead hands) novels, short stories or end-time-prophecies — and who wishes to try his/her/its/dragon’s luck at self-publishing on Amazon (from my experience, HONESTLY what sells will shock you.  As will what doesn’t sell) but is sitting there going “But it’s a complex process.  I have no idea how…”  Amanda Green who often comments here and who is my co-blogger at Mad Genius as well as a member of my critique group, is doing a workshop.  She has done this for two years for Naked Reader Press for which I am now — poor them — art director.

I asked her to send me the info and she did.

Publishing is changing. We all know it. We’ve seen how traditional publishers have struggled, and are still struggling, to adapt to changes in technology and customer demand. Every aspect of the industry has been impacted. But those who have been impacted the most are writers. The question each of us face is whether we view these changes as a door closing on our careers or one opening. In my opinion, it is a door being thrown wide open and, for the first time ever, giving writers the chance to take full control of their careers. This workshop will deal with a number of the issues facing writers as they determine whether or not to take advantage of new opportunities to digitally publish their work.

Here is a brief overview of what we will be discussing during the workshop:

    Some business and legal considerations.
    Software.
    Digital formats.
    Preparing to digitize
    Editing, copy-editing and proofreading
    General formatting considerations
    Distribution possibilities
    Repackager v. doing it yourself
    Where can you do it yourself
    Pros and cons of each
    Specific manuscript formatting issues based on upload method (Smashwords, Lulu, Amazon, B&N, etc)
    Conversion
    ISBN, copyright, etc
    Covers
    Where to find artwork for cheap/free
    Text considerations
    Other considerations
    Pricing
    Price points
    Price control
    Promotional pricing
    Misc. topics including promotion, print on demand, etc.

The workshop is free, although donations are welcomed.

I’m taking it also, since the method I use I learned at Oregon Writers and though it works well, it can drive me bananas with some things — like Smashwords — and glitch majorly on longer works.  Amanda uses different methods/software and I figure if I know both I can pick and choose.

If you have Amanda’s email contact her and she’ll add you.  If not, leave your interest here, and make sure the email is active on your avatar, or leave an email you don’t mind leaving, in occluded format, and she’ll ping you.

Oh, and those of you who are waiting for Witchfinder, I’m working on it right now.  It’s … an ODD chapter.

Okay, cakes made and delivered.  If I can figure out what the kid did with the camera there will be pictures appended.  We got cake1 there without a problem, but because it was so tall I wasn’t sure we could, so I made a back up emergency cake.  (Because I’m insane.  Move along.)  The girls awed and said how cute it was, so… I guess it was worth spending a day on this and making my kitchen worthy of superfund cleanup.  (Which shall happen tomorrow morning.)

Frosting incidents — 2.  Showers — 3.  I think it’s a record, even for summer in Ohio.

The Gauntlet — I don’t think Ms. Ogle is going to take it, partly because, well, let’s face it — if she gets the kind of advances that fund one’s research for five years, I’m dust beneath her carriage wheels.  Eh.  Shrug.  Ain’t enlightened self-interest a b*tch?  When it’s OTHER PEOPLE’s of course. 

Soooooooo…………  I don’t know any other Defender of The Establishment ™ who wants to play, do you?  I guess I’m stuck running my mouth on my own again/still.  BUT… any questions y’all have?  Even if I’ve answered them before, it’s been a good two years.  (Yes, this is called Sarah is lazy and out of blog posts.  Give me some ideas.)  I’ve noted foreshadowing down and of course tomorrow is Witchfinder.  But I’m open to questions.