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

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

No, this is designed to illuminate a type of person all of us, published, unpublished, wanna bes and serious workers at the word-vine will come up against, whether we want to or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Recognize A Wrecker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Peak And The Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, after you’ve reached that summit…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waiter, There’s Soup In My Novel

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

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

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

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

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

How do you fix that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the economic side of this career.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fear Of Darkness

Nell looked at Gabriel as he proclaimed his willingness to take down fairyland if that was what it took to bring his youngest half brother back.  For a moment, for a brief breath, she caught a look in Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater’s face, as he looked at his half-elven sibling, nominally his valet.  She didn’t know what that look was.  It might be surprise or awe or fear.

Nell knew, however, with absolute certainty, in that moment, that Seraphim hadn’t known the details of Gabriel’s ancestry.  He might have known Gabriel was half-elf but not that he was what could be termed a prince of fairyland, nor why he’d left fairyland.  And he definitely hadn’t known how strongly Gabriel felt about elves and the king of fairyland.

It was just a moment, and then Seraphim looked away, his eyes half-lidded, hiding his expression, and is face went back to the impassive, reserved look she’d seen on it before.

Training, she thought, as though it were a novel idea.  The man had been trained to hide his feelings.  He’d been trained to behave impeccably in public.  He’d been brought up to fulfill his role and his role required that he follow a protocol in public and show nothing of his inner thoughts or feelings and, particularly, show no doubt no fear and no pain.

Once having realized that, she could detect things in his expression: pain mostly, and tiredness.  Though he looked alert and aware, she realized there were fine lines at the corner of his mouth, as from holding his features unnaturally serene against suffering.  And his shoulders were held too square and straight, as if he were afraid they’d sag under tiredness.  And his hands held the head of the walking stick far too tightly.

She looked at him until she caught him giving her a long side glance, and then she looked at her feet.  She hadn’t yet decided what to tell him.  What could she let the Darkwater’s know about her origins, her work, her involvement with Antoine, let alone her involvement with Sidell?  What and how much did they need to know?  And how much would endanger them?  She didn’t know enough to know what she could tell and to whom before they became targets for the secret service.

Now that Antoine was dead – something that didn’t seem quite real, yet – she didn’t even know how much of what she thought had happened since she’d landed in Avalon was true, and how much had been a lie perpetrated on her.  The idea that Antoine would try to kill Darkwater made no sense.  Certainly not when Antoine was supposed to be in a dungeon, his life dependent on her good behavior.

Once more, she caught the Duke of Darkside’s glance on her, and she looked down at her feet.  The Darkwaters talked around her.  It seemed as though they had little more thought than she did on how to rescue someone from the clutches of elves, and on this she had very little to hide from them.  She’d had some idea that elves were real here, and their magic here, as opposed to being – as on Earth – mere legends and rumors.  But she knew nothing else.  She’d heard of treaties between the two realms, but had never sought to inform herself of the details.  Her assignments had been among humans.

It seemed as though the conversation was winding down when Gabriel said, “I will speak to my mother.”  From the way he set his jaw after saying it, the quick, concerned glance Seraphim shot him, and the more openly concerned and pitying look given him by Caroline, it was obvious that this was neither an easy nor a safe task, but no one said anything to dissuade him.  The Dowager Duchess said in a tone of someone who relieves her mind, more than someone who says something that needs saying, “We must get Michael back as soon as may be.”

And Gabriel said, automatically, as though he’d been asked whether he intended to wear clothes outside, “Yes, Your Grace, of course.”

Then Darkwater’s voice rose, composed, forceful, “Miss Felix?”

She looked up at him.  She remembered the charade the two brothers had played for the benefit of Darkwater’s mother, and now she wondered if the Dowager Duchess had yet realized there was more to the two of them than they’d been letting on?  Or if she’d known it all along?  Or if she just now noticed that Seraphim’s wastrel ways, his dissolute living were, at most, a mask upon his real activities?  Or perhaps not, Nell thought.  Seraphim wouldn’t be the first man to be both heroic and a libertine.  The two were so far from being opposed character traits that it wouldn’t even be that unusual.  She must remember that when dealing with the two brothers, no matter how much she admired their courage and mutual loyalty.  Until she could find a way to make it back to her native world, she must play by Avalon rules, and by Avalon rules her reputation was both valuable and easily lost, so she must keep undeserving males at bay.  “Your Grace?” she said a trace of reserve in her nature.

Darkwater’s glance slid sideways at the Dowager Duchess.  So, she either didn’t know of the two brothers’ full adventures or Darkwater thought she didn’t know and wished to protect her.  She watched as he frowned slightly, then shook his head as though to himself.  “There is absolutely no reason for me to ask you questions tonight, he said, though I will have to ask you.  I beg you to hold yourself at our disposal.  It’s been a very long… few hours for me, since I woke up, and I don’t believe I can stay awake and speak with any semblance of rationality for much longer.  I would enjoin you not to teleport anywhere.  We would prefer not to fish you out of the trout pond again.”  He glanced at his sister.  “Caroline, if you would take Miss Felix to the blue room, on your floor, and arrange for it to be made up for her use.  Miss Felix, I shall see you at breakfast.”

Nell understood it as what it was: dismissal.  She didn’t try to argue it.  She knew enough of this world to know that Dukes weren’t argued with.  She guessed even that she was being got rid of so they could speak privately, which was probably the point, too, of having Caroline leave with her.  As the youngest female, she would be protected by her older brothers, though Nell guessed that not much escaped Miss Ainsling’s shrewd eyes.

The girl opened her mouth and said, “But Michael–” and must have read something in Darkwater’s look, because she stopped her protest and said, “Yes, Seraphim,” and bobbed a curtsey, then waited while Nell did likewise.

Nell followed her down a series of broad passageways and down two grand staircases, before Miss Ainsling opened her mouth to say, “I despite my older brother.  My older brothers I should say, since it’s no use their pretending Gabriel isn’t one, as his story made perfectly clear.”

“Despise?” Nell said.

“Oh, yes.  They are so stuffy and full of their own consequence.  And the way they try to keep me from doing anything, simply because I’m a girl and young is not to be borne.  Do you have any brothers, Miss Felix?”

“No,” Nell said.  Then sighed.  “That is, I don’t know.  I was adopted, you see.”  And then she thought in terms this world would understand.  “I was a foundling, I mean.  Abandoned.  I don’t know my true parentage.”

Caroline Ainsling sighed.  “Oh, that’s lucky.”

Nell must have made some sound – some gasp – in reply.  She wasn’t aware of it, but Caroline Ainsling laughed, a brief burble.  “I mean, you must understand, that growing up as the Duke of Darkwater’s daughter, and then sister, I was forever being judged by what they did and how they behaved.  I understand papa was terribly shocking, and Seraphim is in a good way to being so.  And then when Papa…  That is, after Papa died, everyone looked at us with pity and wonder, and you know, we were the center of attention, and we could not shed it.  I often wished to just go somewhere and hide, but of course, there was nowhere where I wasn’t known.  Michael is lucky because he can hide out wiht his machines, as it were, and abstract himself from the real world, but I…”  She shrugged.  “I shouldn’t be speaking of these things.  I am conscious of my good fortune in having a family and a position in society.  And I should worry only about recovering Michael, safe and sound.  I am a wretch.  But so I’ve always been.”  And she sighed again, though there was a theatrical element to her chagrin.

But wretch or not, despite her young age, Caroline Ainsling was competent at mustering the staff to make the room assigned Nell very comfortable indeed.  It wasn’t – of course – by any means a room such as she’d have had on Earth.  There was no bathroom attached.  The watercloset – Caroline said, lushing slightly as she pointed – was down the hallway.  There was a basin and a hewer of water from which it could be filled, the hewer perpetually renewing, Caroline said, with warm water.  And the bed was made with clean freshly aired sheets, and the bedspread was velvet and soft.

Nell suspected that were it seen by daylight and not soft magelight, the room would look shabby.  She remembered stories of Darkwater financial difficulties, and she remembered shabby fabric and worn furniture.  But by magelight this room looked luxurious.

When all was ready and the servants retreated, Caroline said, “And Seraphim will want to talk to you, of course, which is a great bore.  But I’ll have the maid wake you with tea in time to get you down for breakfast in the morning.”  And then, as though realizing for the first time that Nell remained in her wet clothes and wrapped in a blanket.  “What fools men are.  No one gave you time to change.”  A self-conscious smile.  “But then, neither have I.”  She gestured towards the closet.  “There is a night dress and robe in there which should fit you.  And there are many dresses from which you can choose, come morning.  Mama used to keep many in different sizes in all the rooms assigned to ladies.  I understand when Papa was alive, we had many house parties, and ladies would slip into the pond or tear their flounces or… there you have it.  One of them should fit you.  If not, ring the bell and tell the maid what you need and it shall be found.  A maid will be sent to dress your hair for breakfast.”

Nell started suspecting the Darkwater house was far more formal than she was prepared to endure.  Then she thought that, perforce, it must be.  After all the man was a duke.

A moment later Caroline was gone, saying, “I shall have hot chocolate brought to you.  You must be very uncomfortable in those soaked clothes.  Do you need a maid to help you undress?”

Nell assured the girl she didn’t, and as soon as Caroline was gone, undressed herself quickly and laid out her clothes by the fire, to dry.  They were, of course, ruined, but she could wear them to return to London, she supposed.

She had just dressed in a nightgown and dressing gown, both of which smelled faintly of mothball, when there was a scratching at the door.  The hot chocolate, Nell thought, and called out, “Come in.”

The door opened, but what came in had never been a maid.  She saw him first in the mirror, very pale, his eyes half-lidded a lingering smile in his pale lips.  She turned around and said, “Antoine!”

Junk Food For The Soul

We’ve gone through boring at the beginning and boring in the middle, so you know it would come to boring at the end.  (Wake up.  This will be interesting.  Even if I used the dreaded b word three times.)

Boring at the end is a different type of boring.  If you got to the end, the book, by definition held your interest that long.  But I’m probably not the only one that gets to the end of a book sometimes and goes “well, that was painless” but can’t remember a single thing about what she just read.

This is not always bad.  In times of high stress I read a lot of popcorn or “chewing gum” books.  In fact for someone like me, who – to allude to Heinlein – is a print addict and who needs a certain amount of reading per day, and who will read old personal ads off the back of fishwrap after brushing off the scales, most of what I read is by definition popcorn.

But there is a difference between popcorn and tofu.  (And for my vegetarian readers, by this I mean unadorned, uncooked, un-seasoned tofu, which by definition has almost anti-taste and takes a lot of seasoning to taste like ANYTHING.)  By definition at the end of popcorn you go “um, that was kind of nice.  I think I’ll have some more.”  (Keep on crunching, we’ll write more.) BUT after a slice of raw tofu most human beings go “uh… that didn’t taste like anything.  I can live without it.”

Boring at the end are the type of books I read and when they’re done, I remember neither author nor title.  In fact – and this is really tough as I tend to remember 99.9% of what I’ve read – I sometimes will re-buy or re-pick-up the same book and only realize I’ve read it halfway through.

Now, you want to make more of an impression than that!  And don’t ask me “why?” because the answer is obvious.  You want to make more of an impression than that because otherwise people won’t pick up your next book, except by accident.

This is still better than having the reader throw the book against the wall and say “I will never, not in a thousand years, read another book by this XYZ>@}|*” but only marginally so.  Because while it won’t burn you, it means ALL of your books will be first books, forever.

So, how do you imbue the book with deep meaning and make it stick in the memory.

The first cure for this is really simple and it’s something I can only in good conscience tell people now.  Even two years ago I’d have told you that you couldn’t do this, because it would be mentor malpractice to advise it.

Because the first cause of doing this is “writing to market.”  Now, I’ve never done this fully, partly because I have a sad dysfunction of the stereotype gene.  Whatever I take on, no matter how much I attempt to make it a cliche tends to get a twist usually in direction “Weird”.  This is the way my mind works, and it’s unlikely I’ll be able to make it work any other way.  So…  Live with it.

However, all of us, from beginner to bestseller, to some extent “wrote to market” in the past.  This is for the very simple reason that there was absolutely no point NOT doing it.  When the powers that were who controlled access to bookstore shelves and therefore to the public made a decision from the top – say (and yes, all these are decisions they made, solely from the top, at some point ) “cozies aren’t real mysteries” or “Space opera isn’t real science fiction” or “Regency isn’t real romance” – you might be able to buck it if you already had a name, but you could NEVER make a good living off bucking it.  Because they wouldn’t take you seriously, and therefore they wouldn’t put you on the shelves.

To what extent did that influence us?  Well, we all read the bestsellers (I wonder how much of a bump they got from that?) even if it wasn’t our subgenre, because we had to know what had impressed a publisher so much they’d pushed it.  We read books on how to write bestsellers, too.  And we would pay attention to what was “hot” right then.  When I started paying attention to the field this was quest fantasy.  Then there was a brief “historical” hotness, which I loved because it was something I could do, but that went away really quickly and we were told it didn’t sell.  Which might be true, or it might be that the minds at the top – the same minds who know their Three Musketeers from the Disney movie – couldn’t keep up and hated to feel like idiots and not be able to tell when they were being spun.  (Yes, I’m uncharitable.  What of it?) So, the next “hot” was something that New York Junior Editors definitely know.  First there was chick lit because, well, duh, Sex And The City did well, so of course books about shoes and sex will do well.  Only they didn’t, which is interesting since at one point that was ALL you could find in all genres in book stores.  Maybe the public has a spine after all (who’d have thunk it?) So, that was brief too, and then there was just sex mostly in the form/excuse of undead porn (thank you Kate for the moniquer) which did well enough because it’s sex & violence and some of it is even competently written.  The last fad I’ve become aware of is steampunk which is one of those that seems to me misguided, since by definition it’s more of a costuming than a writing trend.  It’s a very visual subgenre which doesn’t work well in print.  But it might not matter, anyway, since I don’t think that trends can or will hold on as they have before the onslaught of indie fiction and surprise sellers.  I think the time for trends from the top has passed.

However, we had to be aware of these so we could spin our writing that way.  Put in a sex scene, drop in a werewolf, whatever.  If it was the choice between not being accepted and being accepted you did what you had to do.

Does this mean everything written was pap?  No.  Look, given my ideal career path, when I first came into the field, I’d probably never have written fantasy, or perhaps have written one or two stand-alones in fantasy amid a sea of space opera.  But I got my spirit broken on that before I ever sold novels.  My space opera short stories didn’t sell at all, no matter what the level of competency and in self defense I started writing “significant” sf and a lot of fantasy.  Which sold.  So I was prepared to write fantasy novels.

Now, most of the time the mind that does SF can do fantasy, because it’s the explanations that are different.  However, I made the fantasy mine.  Some would argue too much so, as I’m one of the very few fantasy writers that makes her fantasy feel non-supernatural.  This is partly because my first love was SF.

But there are people – perhaps more lacking in self-confidence, or perhaps just saner – who go “the other way” on that fork in the road.  Having read what’s selling, or having decided to write what’s selling, they go full “pattern” and write such a stereotypical book that it should be sold in a white cover with a bar code.

Those tend to fall under the “tofu book” category.  And those will condemn you to a lifetime of first books.

So, my first advice on beating the bland is easy.  Don’t write books to pattern without making them yours.  Look, in the present day it won’t even help you that much.  Yeah, you might sell to the big houses – maybe – but what are they going to offer you?  Shelf space?  Don’t be silly.  They no longer have command over that.  So, what else?  Cover?  Sister, let me tell you about covers…

I’m not saying here that there aren’t reasons for a dual traditional and indie career.  That would be rich, coming from me, since I’m doing both.  I’m saying that there aren’t reasons compelling enough to justify writing a generic book and suppressing your own individuality (there’s a question if the reasons were ever compelling enough for THAT.)

So, stop playing to the house.  Just write what you want to write.  Some of it you’ll have to publish Indie.  Big deal.  You’ll live.

The other causes for this are more difficult to cure, and we’ll deal with them Monday.  Why Monday you ask?  Well, tomorrow I’ll mostly be running errands, shopping and taking down holiday decor (Witchfinder will PROBABLY be posted late as tonight I’m also dealing with a bunch of minor housekeeping stuff.) and then new year’s intervenes, including the infamous tradition of at least one meal at Pete’s on New Year’s Eve to see off the year in style.  And I’ll have to molest dinosaurs (i.e. visit the natural history museum, whatever they call it these days) either the eve or the day, because that’s what I do (Yeah, like you’re not all geeks.  Pull the other one, it plays jingle bells.)  So posting will likely be irregular.  I’ll still try to post everyday, but won’t make any promises as to theme and promptness of post.  So, class dismissed, see you Monday, drink a glass of champagne for me and don’t forget your writing resolutions.

Plot Can Never Dull Her Infinite Variety

Okay.  So, you’ve got all your ducks in a row. Unless your plot is about misaligned ducks.  You’ve sent the pope for a swim.  You’ve Heinleined your info.  You’ve let go of what you can’t control.  Your plot starts with action.  You throw us in head first.  Your middle sequence is a rising series of battles.

And yet, your first readers, or, worse, your reviewers, read your book and say “It’s so boring.”  So you scratch your head and you say “Uh, but I did it all right.”

And you might have done.  But what you might be looking at is a failure of foreshadowing technique.

Foreshadowing is one of those things no one tells you are essential and which, when it fails, mimics several other issues.  So you might get told you don’t have a plot.  Or that your timing is wrong.  Or that the plot is too predictable or not predictable enough.

If you’re getting told stuff like that, and you’re absolutely sure you have a plot and that the plot is long enough for your needs and that it does in fact have some surprises in the structure, you might have a foreshadow failure.

How can that be a foreshadow failure?  Well… To explain, let me give you an overview of a situation in which foreshadowing – what we make sure readers know ahead of a scene and which they need to know for the scene to work – is essential.

Okay, here’s the situation, not unusual for a woman-in-peril or a thriller.  Your female character comes home to her apartment.  She’s showering, undressing, putting make up on.  And while she’s doing all this, there’s a serial killer hidden in the closet, watching her, waiting to strike.

You can make several mistakes with this kind of situation.

1 – killer from the ceiling, a variant of elephant from the ceiling.  This is page 120, the killer has never been mentioned yet, and suddenly he springs out of the closet and tries to knife your character.  This almost kills your reader with shock, as until now he thought this was a book about mutant chickens.  Don’t do this.  If your mutant-chicken stalking serial killer is needed now, but you didn’t plan on him, go backward and make sure that he’s mentioned, hinted at or somehow suspected from the beginning.

2 – The killer has been talked about so much that when he shows up people go “Oh, it’s just the killer.  This is so boring.  We’ve expected him all along!”  Master the art of foreshadowing without making it so obvious that people are going “Oh, the killer.  DUH.”  One way to do this is – to paraphrase Heinlein, misdirection, indirection and razzle dazzle.  Mention of the killer is in a talk about mutant chicken eggs.  Alternately he’s mentioned, but your character laughs at the idea. When it happens it’s not out of the blue, but you also don’t expect it all along.

3 – We don’t know killer is in the closet.  Let me put it this way – your character showering, putting on her best clothes and applying make up is NOT riveting.  However, if we know killer in the closet might jump out at her at any minute, it becomes fascinating.  We watch and wait for the killer to attack.  Good suspense.

Unless…

4- You tell us everything about the killer ahead of time.  We know he won’t jump out till midnight.  This takes all the interest out of the dressing scene.  This is a failure of TOO much foreshadowing.

Now you’re sitting there, holding your breath and threatening to turn blue if I don’t tell you how to do this foreshadowing thing just right.

I can’t.  This is something you learn by doing.  One small thing you can do is make yourself aware of it.  Take two of your favorite books re-read and mark or compile all instances of foreshadowing.  And then practice, practice, practice.

You wouldn’t expect to dance the ballet without practicing, and I guarantee you Mona Lisa was not DaVinci’s first picture.  So, to learn foreshadowing, if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.

Round Round, You Get Around

One of the common syndromes of the middle of the book is the loop-de-loop syndrome, or the “why are we going around in circles, again?”

One common reason for this is that the author ran out of plot and decided he needed more wordage and tried to add “something happens here” in a way it wouldn’t affect the plot before or since, which is fine, as far as the writer is concerned.  So the author added three or four incidents that are solved and add nothing to character development.

These might be entertaining enough, but people are not stupid and they do realize that they’re being led in a merry go round.

Look, even when I was a kid and was taken on those little airplanes attached to the center of the ride, after a while I realized I couldn’t fly out into the wild blue yonder.

So… if you have loop-de-loop syndrome, what can you do?

First, you can take it out, and you can figure out how to make it honest plotting complications, and revise the rest of your book, backward and forward to make it integral to the plotting.

But… but… you’re not willing to do that – well, tough.  Seriously, kids, the readers are definitely not stupid, an you need to give them honest plot for honest money.

The second thing you an do is take it out and make the story shorter.

But Sarah – you whine – what if I didn’t do that to pad the story?  It is part of what I wrote, and I just realized in revision that it has loop-de-loop syndrome?  Doesn’t the character have to go through trials and tribulations?  What do I do?

Well, then.  If you weren’t padding the story and you still ended up with loop-de-loop, here are some things to consider

1 – Do you have rising action or is it all at the same level?
Loop-de-loop is caused by same-level, same old same old syndrome.  To correct it make sure that something bigger is at stake or something more is needed each try-fail sequence.  So, the first time your character had to bend to go through the passage and the fate of her family was at stake. Next time make her crawl on her knees and the fate of her city is at stake.  Next time, you have her crawl on her belly and the fate of the country is at stake.  You get what I mean?  Raise stakes AND effort required and you won’t get the feeling of going around and seeing the same landscape again.

2 – Are the confrontations happening between the same two people in the same old place?
Sometimes you get the feeling that it’s all going in circles because of staging.  So, if your characters keep arguing in a diner, have one of the scenes happen in the bedroom and/or in the car.  Think of the complications this can add, too, like a character demanding to be let out of the car.  Same thing with stage business.  I think I’ve told you before one of my books RIGHT after I discovered stage business my characters drank so much coffee they’d have spent their life in the bathroom in real life.  One of the good ways to break this, have a character do something that’s his job or hobby, while the argument takes place.

3- You’re overmatching the opposition.  If your character is stronger/smarter/better than all opposition and you let the him/her win everything easily, you can get the – yawn – feeling you’ve seen it all before, and what’s the point reading more.
A) consider solution for problem one.  Have rising stakes.
B) consider that even a weak or stupid opponent can get one in by accident and make life difficult even for a superhuman.  So make it so.  Make your character work for it, more and more.

Next up “It’s sooo boring.”