Let’s talk about endings.  (I said endings, not ENDS, so those of you in the back who just started elbowing each other and chortling can stop right now.  There are no off color remarks in this here imaginary classroom.)

This is brought about by three occurrences: First, the con is over; second, I hope to end A Few Good Men; and I just finished reading ConSensual for Kate Paulk.  The end took me completely by surprise in a not good way.  I’m not going to say how because a) it’s her first pass, and heavens only know what the end will reveal.  b) part of the reason it struck me as off is that this is a series, and her ending this way sets it up for a direction the series is not going in (yeah, she talks to me) and that could set up a problem later.

So, on this very scattered Monday morning, when my caffeine meter is still about half down, here are a few thoughts about endings.  Particularly endings of novels, which are MUCH more difficult than ending shorts or poems and which have to be more satisfying.

1- Make sure your ending is satisfying.  This means, yes, if you’ve been dragging us through this novel, with a repulsive anti-hero, kill him, painfully.  OTOH for most novels a “and they all died” is about as satisfying as “and they all woke up and it was all a dream” – which I still get a lot when I judge contests.

2- Make sure your ending is foreshadowed.  And the gentleman in the back can JUST stop whining that he wants his ending to be a surprise.  Yeah, don’t we all.  Remember though no matter how carefully you hide the ending, someone will GUESS so you have to have something besides the surprise.  And besides the surprise you want is not WTF?  It’s “Oh, wow.  I never saw that coming.  But now I see that the clues were all there.”  The way to do this?  Well, I know only one way – put in the clues for more than one ending, and hide the real ones under the false ones.  However, I tend to look more for SATISFACTION than surprise.  Surprise SOMETIMES in how the ending comes about, but not the ending itself.  Look, if everyone wanted surprise endings, Romance would NEVER sell.

3- For series, be very VERY careful how you end a book.  This is because anything that happens at the end of a book assumes more importance in the reader’s mind than the ten thousand things that happened in the middle.  I.e. it’s what they walk away thinking about, and what they’ll build their imagination on until the next book/movie.  Why is this important?  Well…  Imagine for ex that at the end of book 5 your guy walks off into the sunset with this hot chick.  No matter how many clues you build in that this is just a fling like other flings he’s had IN books, no matter how much you foreshadow, because they walk off together at the end, this romance will seem much more important.  They’ll expect the next book to be about them setting up house together and will feel you pulled a Karate Kid on them when he starts the next book without her and, btw, book 24 they’ll still be asking you “So, when is he getting together with X?”  You don’t want that, you don’t do that at the end.  This sometimes can take a LOT of finegling.

4- This is actually a general rule, but it’s particularly important for endings: if you’re going to kill someone, make it count.  I.e. if you have a good or neutral person die for the final victory, build them up (sometimes by going backward through the book from the end.)  And if you are going to kill the villain, make him good and repulsive!

And to end this, that’s about all I can think of this morning…

I think I’ve quoted Eric Flint before on the subject of “if you’re not crazy when you become a writer you’ll be crazy within a few years.”

Of course, part of me views this as the inevitable consequence of living too close to your imagination.  You sit there with the people in your head and concentrate on the imaginary world, the details of it, the texture, and how thins work.  Those of us who are obsessed with making things plausible, research past any reasonable point.  Even when I was a little girl, telling stories to myself, I spent type studying anatomy and biology and animal physiology (uh, my stories involved aliens, mkay?  Often spider aliens) as a way to convince my listener – myself – that this was all possible.  This evolved into the type of either insecurity or compulsiveness (you decide!) which made me read 40 books on Shakespeare before writing my first series.

[Does this mean everything in my books is infallible?  No.  When it comes to years, I have this curious form of weirdness that makes me think “the sixteenth century” is 1600+ No.  I don’t mean I think that CONSCIOUSLY, I mean I write it that way and it will slip by if my copyeditor doesn’t catch it.  In the same way, attempts at copyediting often confuse things I know perfectly well.  I’m thinking here specifically of the copy editor to Plain Jane who spent a considerable amount of time “fact checking” me on the internet…  When I’d used more reliable genealogies and a family history written by the present-day-descendant of the family.]

What it means, though, is that I spend a lot of time inside my head, with my worlds.  This is deceptive, as – between that and my busy, busy social life on FB, AIM and email – I often don’t realize how little I see people outside my family.  Eric, himself, in a con panel, said that was the problem – that writers lived too much by themselves.  (And why he thought cons were necessary.)

Why is this important, you say?

Well, I never though of myself as introverted, much less a recluse.  I was never one of the people who were student council leaders or anything of the sort, but I was one of the popular kids, at least in college, and I often spent my entire day in crowds of some sort.  I tutored, I attended classes, I often had parties in the evening.  I didn’t find crowds particularly draining.

So, I never thought of myself as an introvert.

Which is why I’m getting really worried at the fact that even going to a con for a couple of panels leaves me feeling half dead.  And I’m getting REALLY tired of the stomach upsets at every con.  Since they’ve also manifested before other stressful events, I think that’s all these are now, a sign of “I’m stressed.”

Let me just say that my body could have picked a more unlovely way to communicate this, but I’m at a loss to figure out what.  Going to cons and preparing for cons is hard enough without feeling dizzy and nauseous all the time.

And no, it’s not my fans.  You guys know I love you, right?  I think that it’s simply the crowds, the disruption of routine and not being able to kick off my shoes and lean back.  It’s knowing people are watching me, as well as listening to me.  It’s made somewhat easier by having a room I can run away to, and somewhat worse by my not sleeping well or not sleeping enough.

It might be I have to start inoculating myself against this by doing something like booking dinner with a medium-large group of friends and acquaintances once a month or something.  Or it might be I lock myself in my office and start sliding the manuscripts out under the door.

Yeah, I think I like that last one.  What do you think?

This is a really quick post, as I’m headed to Fencon.  I’ll report on the con this evening.  However, because A Touch of Night (with Sofie) my Pride and Prejudice and Dragons book — is free on Amazon right now — I meant to post here the beginning of my “elf prince Darcy” story as sort of a sop to you guys (and a joke, too.  So you see how weird I get.)  And while I couldn’t even remember what I named it, or where it might be on my computer, I thought, “Not a problem.”  I’ll search the Derbyshire Writers’ Group archive for my name.

So I went there…  And the fan fiction archive is gone.  Now the question is… do I even have it saved anywhere that I can find anymore?  And if not, why not?  And don’t say because I’m dumb.  I know that.
Let that be a lesson to you, guys.  Put not your faith in online groups.  I’ll go and attend the con, now.  Come to the signing if you’re in the area!  It’s at eleven thirty.  And then I’ll look and see if the story is anywhere….

Critique groups, critique partners and other such checks on your sanity and the sanity work are important, not to say vital.

But there’s another type of “check” that can be sanity or insanity, very good or very bad.

I have a stable of experts, from law enforcement to various parts of science, whom I call on when in a pinch.  You guys know who you are, I often acknowledge you in my books and rest assured you’re the good guys.

A good expert is the one who can tell you the relevant facts you need to finish your story.  A great expert is the one who looks at your story, pulls his hair out, says “you got it all wrong.”  And then spends three days researching till he comes up with facts that WILL fit your story if you make minimal adjustments and don’t change the plot much.

I’ve been blessed with great experts.

On the other side of this, there’s what I call the “self appointed experts.”  These people are often other writers who have a “Method” and whose main modus operandi is standing athwart the storyline/setting/character you want to use and screaming “You can’t do that!”

Sometimes they are well intentioned.  For instance, the gentleman who came to one of my occasional writers’ groups and who told me “you can’t sell a first novel that’s longer than 100,000 words, no one will buy it, no matter how great it is.”

This, by the way, was said at the time when the books being bought were climbing up to 250000 words – what my friend Dave Freer calls Goat Gaggers.  But this gentleman had been to a world con and heard an editor say he didn’t want anything longer than 100000 books and was trying to be helpful to those of us who had no money to go to worldcon.

Mind you, this gentleman is the same who – reading one of my space operas – told me that calling a gun burner just wasn’t done and also that guns don’t zing, they snick or crack or…  Without bothering to notice I was talking about a laser weapon, not a normal present day gun.  So one has to question the good intentions, just a little.

And that’s part of it.  The self-appointed expert is most often a contradiction and if you wonder if they’re wholly well intentioned you might be right.  In general I don’t think they themselves could tell you for sure what their intentions are, if they’re honest with themselves.

Often they are “elder” writers as you’re just coming in, and their intention, if they were honest, is to keep their superiority over you, when they’re afraid you’re moving past them.  Their “superiority” may be largely imaginary, which makes it worse.

My one experience, for instance, didn’t involve any of my multi-published or bestselling friends, whom I tend to listen to with rapt attention because, duh, they know better than I – but when I was just starting to sell short stories, I was friends with an author who had sold one novel, years ago.  She was a fountain of “you cannot do that” and all of them bordered from the crazy to the wrong.  More the fool I, I allowed her to kill two books.  In one of them, as I was working on the preliminary outline for a thousands years old nomadic culture, I talked about it to her, and mentioned they often stayed in caves along their route.  She told me I had it all wrong.  I needed to start from the geology up.  For there to be caves, they needed to be in sandy, limestone country.  This, by the way, is nonsense.  Of course there are caves in other rocks (I grew up with caverns in granite) and over thousand of years, the culture would have MADE them where they weren’t.  But I thought (I was very young) maybe that was the American perception and I’d never sell it.  Besides, I didn’t want to start with the geology…

The other one, which might still see the light of day as Hell Bound, was an urban fantasy where this woman was being stalked by what appeared to be an angel.  I showed her the first three chapters and she informed me it didn’t have an “engine” that there was nothing “driving the book.”  Again, I was very green and very young and I thought that she must be right, though I didn’t see it.

It wasn’t until I sold my first trilogy and sent her the manuscripts – and she didn’t realize it was sold and told me that I’d never sell it because the books “engine” was romance, not fantasy.  To this day I have NO idea what she meant.  And that’s when I realized – in retrospect – that I should never have listened to her.

Then there is the “subject matter” expert.  The problem with these is that sometimes they are truly experts in their subjects, but they’re not writers and can’t imagine their own field 500 years in the future.  They’ll be too bound by “the way things are.”  These are the people who, fifty years ago, would have told you that there would never be small personal computers in every home, and would have laughed at you if you told them there would be a computer of sorts in every coffee maker.

When picking your science experts, pick science fiction fans, they tend to be more flexible.

Then one of my fans told me about a sub-set of the “experts” who, apparently, are experts in made up lore.  They will tell you your elves have to be pretty and sweet (Or blood thirsty and evil) because that’s the way they are in some RPG.  Of course, those of us who are so old that RPGs are “those things my crazy friends play”, just snort and giggle at “the RPG doesn’t do it that way” and shrug.  But I understand for the young kids, who think that game antecedent is as valid as legend, this can be a stopping point.

So, my advice on experts?  If you didn’t ask for the advice, do not take it too seriously.  If something sounds right, or as though it might be worrisomely right, check them with an internet search or ask someone you know.

The best advice on experts?  Find imaginative, cooperative, brilliant experts in whatever field, that will make your plot work within the facts.  And no, I’m not sharing mine.  (My preshious!)  Heaven knows I keep them busy enough!  Thank you guys!

Yesterday I blew my top – in a thoroughly ladylike manner.  Okay, in a lady who wears fishnet stockings manner (but I wear pearls, too, and everyone knows pearls mean you’re lady!) – about repetitive sex scenes that add nothing to the plot.  (Yes, I am the sort of person who will downgrade an erotic novel because of spelling mistakes.  And I totally will point out if your magic system doesn’t fit in with any magical system known to men.  And don’t get me started on your utopian version of communitarian pre-history.  No.  Just don’t.  And if you’re smart don’t bring it up at a panel with me.  No, just don’t.)

However, there’s something I long ago realized.  I need to repeat myself.  I say it again, I need to repeat myself.

To clarify – I realized sometime ago (Okay, a year or so.  I’m not that bright, and besides, this is pretty hard to believe) that I’m not the center of everyone’s universe.  Specifically, I’m not the center of the universe for everyone who reads either this blog or my books.

To put it bluntly – and shockingly.  I mean, who knew? – you people don’t sit there and wait with rapt attention for me to pronounce myself on something.  When you meet me at cons most of you don’t carry notebooks and pencils to jot down my every utterance.  (A few of you do, of course, for which I’m incredibly grateful.  Also, slightly creeped out.)

What this means, as incredible as it may seem is that I often have to repeat myself.  And by this I don’t mean I have to say exactly what I said before, as in “Get up.”  “Wipe your nose.”  “Learn some history!”  “Think for yourself.”  “Get off my lawn.”  But more subtle stuff.

I’ve long ago found out that not only I but every author must embed the same information at least three times in a novel, if the information is crucial and you want people to get it before you get to the plot point for which it is essential.  Because, you never know – shocking I know! – people might get distracted just as they’re about to read that one paragraph, then unintentionally skip a paragraph.  It might even happen twice.

So, say, if my character has a special psychic power that allows her to talk to bunnies, I might mention it once, then have another character talk about it and then hang a flag on it, by having her hold a conversation with a bunny in a verdant meadow.

If it’s a more shocking psychic power, say an ability to detect a soul in a politician, it might require a couple more repetitions.

This I’ve known and accepted for some time.

But more importantly, I’ve found in doing blog posts that just covering a theme once won’t do.  This is sometimes because, well, things change.  Like, it’s amazing how my view on self-publishing has changed in the last year.  But it’s also because, frankly, people aren’t going to search my blog archive back for four years, or even because their perspective is so different that the way I covered a theme before didn’t make sense, but a slightly different approach will.

This is very difficult for me, since normally I don’t like saying the same thing twice in non-fiction.  I used to think that if I explained things to people just ONCE they’d “get” it and then change their minds (or not.)

But I find that this isn’t true.  Just as with fiction, people need to hear it repeated a few times, before it sinks to the “oh, yeah, of course” level.  The more shocking the topic, the more it needs to be repeated.  And most people, of course, are more willing to die than to think.

So I find that like someone lost in a spiraling labyrinth, I need to repeat myself in a slightly different way each time, and each time the ensuing discussion will reveal people got it SLIGHTLY differently.  Which is fine.  And also the way they get it influences the way I think about it, setting myself up for the slightly different next post on the subject.

It’s a rather startling process.

Yes.  I’m serious.  No, I mean it.

I tell you three times.

As many of you know – because I’ve told you – I don’t have anything against sex. (Well, not at the moment. It would make writing awkward, and besides it would shock the cats.) I have been happily married for twenty six years and I have two sons, neither of which, despite their belief, is a virgin birth.

I am, however, getting sick and tired of sex in books. Oh, not sex as sex. I mean, most of you know I’m not a prude. I can read sex without much worries (except sometimes I wonder if people bend that way – in other planets, I know they don’t on Earth.) I’ll even admit there was a time when I was about 13 or 14 when I would read an entire book for the three paragraphs of sex. I suppose that was part of the age. You see, I’d never had sex, I assumed it would be an eon, give or take, before I had sex, and I wanted to know everything about it.

So, why am I getting sick of it? Because most of it doesn’t mean anything. Worse, it’s dreary to read.

It’s like there is some directive from above on “there must be sex here.” In fact, I know there is a directive out in Romance about x sex scenes at x places in the book. The number of xxx in which book depends on the line, but it’s carefully dictated. I can also say that in one of my series, I was told I MUST have sex scenes, even though I felt that sex didn’t belong in it.

So some sex in books is the result of pressure from what used to be the only means of getting books on the shelves. And on the part of the publishers, themselves, I think it was an effort to cater to what they perceived to be a universal taste.

Is it a universal taste? I don’t know. I can only tell you what I know and what I think.

I think a lot of the sex in books is boring. It makes no sense, it accomplishes nothing. If it doesn’t outright violate the character – really? A regency girl giving it up after one kiss? – it is at best oh um. They kiss they throb they flutter, they grind, they penetrate, there’s things that get hard and things that get moist, there’s how he’s never had it that good and she’s never felt this way before and zzzzzzzzzzz. What? Sorry. It’s just I’ve read so many of these.

Possibly there is some demographic out there whom this satisfies, who feels thrilled at the mere mention of sex. They’re probably thirteen. Or perhaps fourteen. But there are indications that it’s not the ticket to money and success (except insofar as marketing distorts things) that publishers believe it is. There is a certain hysteria of falling numbers and increasing sex under the belief that doing more of what’s failed is a sane business approach. (Do they teach this in the ivy leagues, or something?)

In my opinion, what sells is not explicit sex, but sexual tension (Something I doubt most publishers – jaded by books crossing their desk every day – might not be able to tell with two hands and a seeing eye dog) does sell. Sexual tension – as opposed to sex – makes the reader continue reading, makes us interested, makes us crave the moment when the two would-be-lovers, yearning for each other bur holding back, finally kiss or even touch.

For instance, Georgette Heyer’s Venetia or Silvester have enough sexual tension in it that at the end of the second, the phrase “Sparrow, Sparrow,” has more excitement in it than any of the multi-page anatomically correct sex scenes I ever read. And, FYI, Heyer is still selling very well indeed.

Not that sex is forbidden in this – I’ve read a few urban fantasies in which the sex builds the sexual tension, due to something the character can’t (or shouldn’t) overcome. Or must overcome. The point being the sex becomes part of the plot and entwines the plot and heightens everything else.

On the other hand, in a lot of urban fantasies and in 3/4 of the romances, you could take the sex scene out completely and no one would notice. Well, maybe the publishers looking for the x that marks the spot. And in many books it gets either clinical and dry, or silly and dreary. If you must describe a part of the female anatomy in such exaggeration that it sounds like a cabbage unfolding and unfolding and unfolding yet again, you’ve probably gone too far. Suggestion and indication – note not prudishness and playing keep away – are more… interesting than tons of ink spilled in the service of anatomic descriptions.

The best way to write sex is the best way to write anything else in a plot: irresistible force meets immovable object (again, and again, and again, harder, faster… er… get your mind out of the gutter. And then come back and toss a life preserver to my mind, would you?) Have your character want, crave, need and yet not be able to get for good and sufficient reason (and there must be a real reason, just as the need must be palpable not just “I want it bad.”) And then have all this serve the greater plot. And then, maybe, just maybe you’ll have something worth reading. (And if you’re writing erotica as such, I highly recommend How To Write Erotica by Valerie Kelly. Actually I highly recommend this book for the writing technique of “immediate writing.” She gives very useful hints on what to give in detail and what to shade in. Caution, it has graphic passages. Not for the squeamish or the faint of heart.) On the other hand, if you don’t want to write explicit sex, be brave and original and keep the graphic sex out.

I believe in the indie market place we’ll see more sex and more sexless books too. I can also easily predict that if the sex counts the book will do well, if the sex doesn’t count…. Yawn, who needs it?

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

The care and feeding of a good critique group.

Now that my writers’ email lists are full of chatter about going at least partially indie, having a good writers’ group becomes essential.

The problem is finding a good group. And part of that is what the group is required to be.

In general, we want a writers group that will be:

Supportive during the downs of the writing career – and there will be a lot of downs.

Capable of celebrating the highs of the writing career – this happens too.

Like your writing enough that they don’t start every critique with “To begin with, this didn’t work for me.”

Be objective enough to tell you when your baby is ugly or at least needs to be potty trained

Like YOU enough to put up with you when you go neurotic –you will, if you’re not crazy when you start writing, you’ll get so.

REALLY like you enough to tell you “Okay, now you’re just jumping at shadows.”

This has all to be accomplished in an environment where, often, the only thing you have in common is the writing, you’re each other’s sole, regular social contact (who has time for a social life when you’re writing? Also, as I believe more people will be able to make a living from writing in the new model, more of us will not have day jobs), where you’re to a certain extent all rivals, pursuing the same goal, and where the normal response to your friend achieving a breakthrough in either technique or business is “Will I ever get one, too?” This is also an environment in which people who are incredibly frustrated in their would-be professional lives can feel like they have some sort of power. This often leads to people who become the tyrants of the writers group and exert their tyranny over crazy things like commas or words that don’t come from the same root.

Our group found we could maximize functionality with some hard and fast rules:

-Take the manuscripts home the week before. No reading aloud. Hearing something read is not the same as reading it yourself and someone who reads well and dramatically can paper over issues.

– Try to read them in the same environment you’d read a book.

-No discussing manuscripts in advance of meetings. (This leads to a false consensus. Only one person might have trouble with the schmerps, but by the time you sit down at meeting everyone will be convinced they hated the schmerps.)

– No nitts in spoken critique. I don’t care how many typos the manuscript has. Mark them and go on with life. If awfully typo-ey, then just say “You have an awful lot of typos, do a careful go over before anyone else sees it.”

– two minutes per critique, no extensions. That limits the amount of “think of something to say” and the horrible butchering if someone really hated something.

– if you don’t write, you can’t critique. You’ll be excused maybe a day off, but not more than that. If you haven’t written in two weeks, you can’t critique (this keeps the gods of workshops at bay)

– You’re not competing with each other. You will remember the goal is for ALL of you to be profitably published, and frankly it helps to break in as a group and help the others promote, too.

Things that will help:

If something bad happens, have chocolate. If something good happens, have chocolate. Reserve a bit of time after the critique session for decompression. This doesn’t need to be going out to eat (I had to drop out of a group when I was a young mother because I couldn’t afford dinner AND babysitter) – it can be a coffee in the kitchen of the member at whose house you meet. Learn to laugh together – you’ll need it. Because there will be moments you’ll want to cry.

Oh, and if someone is terrorizing the entire group and you can’t get rid of him any other way, tell him you’re disbanding, then change the time/place of meeting. (Yes, unfortunately we had to do that once. This will happen early on.)

Most importantly: enjoy the process.

 

A few days ago, in my conference, I asked for topic suggestions and one of the ones I got was to write about writers in the media, as compared to the real thing. (BTW, still open to topic suggestions, if any of you want to ping me with one.)

This is more difficult for me to write about than it sounds, because truly, the only time I watch movies is when I’m sick and/or doing something else so mindlessly boring that I need to distract myself. This including ironing or exercising when it’s too snowy for me to go out. So I watch maybe all of five movies a year, a lot of it re-watching old favorites. Yes, yes, I AM odd. As for TV, I watch it even more rarely. I’m NOW catching up with Stargate which is all new to me.

Most of what I know about TV is filtered to me through my husband who watches tv series while exercising, because it’s timed more perfectly to his schedule than movies.

My impression might or might not therefore be valid. However that has never really stopped me from shooting my mouth about stuff I don’t know anything about (I’m a fiction writer. I make crap up. Live with it.)

To begin with, when I was very young, my impression of a writers’ life came mostly through pulp novels, a lot of them pulp sf novels. In them, agents would send their writers off for weekends at borrowed country estates (I’m trying to remember the title. Simak. Tunnel from the future – mind is blank. I can remember the Portuguese title, but that’s the same as the American title for Clark’s Our Children’s Children, which in Portuguese was called “The Book of the Grand Seigneurs” Yeah, that – translation and titles, is probably another post, if anyone has the slightest interest) told them they were working too hard (or not at all), suggested cures (Martians Go Home, Fred Pohl) or came over to make sure their writer was working. Writers worked a lot, very hard. Publishers were shadowy figures, in the background and mostly published whatever they were given.

Of course, you know this is not PRECISELY true. And wasn’t even when I started out. It might have been true in the forties, for pulp authors. I honestly don’t know. When I came in agents were the first slush readers for houses – effectively, if not in name – so not only were they harder to get than (sometimes) a publisher (if you met one at a con, say) but they were often more impersonal than publishers. Very often during my career I had an easier time hearing from a publisher/editor than from an agent. And yeah, no matter how much your agent approved of what you did, publishers STILL culled further. Which, for once in this process, makes perfect sense. (Of course that’s all upended now with ebooks.)

Then I came to the US and started writing in earnest and had what I think is the normal impression – all writers are well off. Well, at least they make enough to be upper middle class, right? It seems logical, given the amount of work that goes into a book, and how few people can do it competently. The ones who aren’t very good don’t last, the ones who last are raking it in.

I was, of COURSE, going to be very good and therefore I would be supporting my husband by the time we hit thirty, and then he could work on his music. (Splort. Giggle. Yeah, that worked out for us.)

Ironically, if I had made a sale back when I was twenty something (I was saleable, mind, I just had clue zero how to go about SELLING. I wasn’t “good” but that’s something else. Tons of people aren’t, who sell. And tons of people are who don’t sell.) at the levels paid to mid list writers then, two books a year would have doubled our income and given us a significant help at the beginning. But I didn’t know how to even start selling, so… Nothing doing.

Little by little I learned better. Which is why now I roll my eyes when I read books (a lot) about some writer with no contacts and no special attributes who just shoots to the top of the charts because she/he’s so “brilliant.”

I see this in the mass media too – and of course, I wish it were true, even if I myself might not be as brilliant as I’d like to be, because as a reader, I’d get wonderful stuff – that if you’re really good you’ll make it big. Often the plot of books/movies, etc with a writer are that of the writer finally breaking through and writing better and enjoying enormous success. This makes for great plotting. It’s also, alas, not true. For the time I’ve been in the business, at least, the publishers have been under the impression that they were Hollywood and that the important thing was to ‘manufacture celebrity’ as a way of selling books. Many times the books themselves weren’t read (that’s how important the quality was) if the proposal met basic standards and the author was “nothing special” in the way of “something we can promote” and not having a “platform” – this meant the author was not particularly beautiful, cool, didn’t have an interesting personal story or (lately) a well-viewed blog, and didn’t know anyone in the business. These were in general relegated to the mid list no matter how brilliant the book might be. (This was responsible for making Sir Terry Pratchett largely unknown in the US while already a bestseller in the UK. Gave me great comfort to know he was selling about what I sell per book. You see, British guy, not particularly sightly, no “platform” – books were pure gold, but you had to FIND them to read them, and distribution in the US was a laydown of about 5k copies per book. [I got very lucky and found him early on because someone in town bought all the British editions, then sold them to my favorite used bookstore.] Their excuse for why he didn’t sell here was “British humor” – it took changing his agent and editor both for him to break out of that slot. I’m sure the numbers from GB helped with that break out. If he’d been an American and published only here, even the greatest writing genius of our time might still be selling 3 to 5k copies per title. If they hadn’t got rid of him yet.)

But sometimes the movies get it at least sort of right. The title of this post is from Sliding Doors (which you absolutely must see if you haven’t.) It is spoken by the main character’s no-good boyfriend and it captures an attitude I’ve often seen among “wanna bes” They want to be writers in the worst way. And they are. As in, they never finish anything, because it has to be a towering work of genius. Someone in their childhood convinced them they’re brilliant, and… well, poor things. From that movie too comes the splortch worthy line of “I know one day you’ll finish your book and we’ll be rich.” My friend Rebecca Lickiss and I laughed till we cried, because see, it is what every new writer – and their relations – thinks and… well, not true. Notably, the rest of the theater thought we were insane. At least no one else laughed, and some people stared. Which tells you how widespread that myth is.

As for Castle, I haven’t watched it. To some extent, the entire idea of his getting ATTACHED to a police unit is silly. Writers write. Yeah, we might go out on a police ride-along (I haven’t, but I don’t write procedurals) but the chance of being that involved just for research is close to nil. We’re more likely to cultivate a police officer buddy and then call them at the most outrageous hours with questions. Another thing my husband told me that made me grin was the idea of the poker game with all these big names. It’s cute. REALLY cute. And it’s not as if you all don’t know each other – bestsellers usually do. And heck, I know tons of bestsellers. It’s just that the chances of you all being in the same place at the same time, much less doing so weekly are zilch.

All the writers I do work like heck, even the bestsellers. And these days publicity/con, etc commitments are as big as contracts, which means chances of you being in the same town at the same time, even you all live there, are almost none. A bestseller friend of mine tries to get a bunch of us local writers together fairly often, and he succeeds about twice a year, if that. Divergent travel/delivery schedules keep us in conflicting “orbits.” The last get-together was one of the better attended. There were about ten of us, but some people were “missing”. There’s always people missing, because of scheduling conflicts. You know how you guys go to cons to see your favorite authors? You know how periodically all authors disappear from the con for hours? Yeah, that’s because what entices US to the con is the chance to socialize with our friends. Weirdly, I sometimes see my friends from here in town ONLY at worldcon, across the country.

However, one thing my husband told me Castle did is sort of true – at least has been true at times in my life and might be true again – I don’t remember the exact quote, but Castle was trying to spin a bunch of stuff about his process and his police partner snaps “You mean, wait till the last minute, then write the book in three days in a caffeine fueled haze?”

What it didn’t say and it’s sadly true (perhaps because like alcohol and drugs, which I advise against, btw, it’s a way of breaking through the conscious constraints which is good for self-doubting authors, like most of them) is that such work is often the best the author does. If it said that, it wouldn’t be a good story, so it doesn’t. But it is the truth, nonetheless.

*I promised a peek at my husband’s novel.  Okay fine I didn’t promise it but — eh eh eh eh eh — he left his computer unwatched (foolish man) and I — eh eh eh eh eh — took the first five pages or so off his drive.  Mwah ah ah ah ah.  Enjoy, because I’m going to be in SO MUCH trouble.*

Chapter 1

Meet Ninth Euclid

 

 

          When I was a skinny boy working on my daddy’s farm, I loved watching the sun rise over the fields.  There was a quiet just before the Oasis dawn that’s simply unparalleled on any other world in the Eternal Empire.  I’d sit in the hayloft in the south barn, whose single window faced the magnificent sunrise, close my eyes, bask in the blissful silence and pretend I was the only child of parents who didn’t talk much.

          It’s the kind of fantasy that could only be created by someone like me, the youngest in a family with ten children.  My surname is Ancel, but nobody remembers to use it, since there’s no other Ninth Euclid in memory. 

          My daddy, displaying a certain lack of imagination and not a little eccentricity, saw fit to name me and each of my eight brothers Euclid.  He said once that he had no idea what the name meant, but that he liked the way it sounded.  The first two boys were twins, and Daddy couldn’t figure which one should be Euclid, so, after two weeks of arguments with my mama, he gave them both the nonsense name.  Everyone called them First Euclid and Second Euclid, so when the next boy came around, he named him Euclid, too. 

          My one sister, Hannah, thought it was funny to call out, “Euclid-one-to-nine,” for family dinners.

          We Euclids all slept in a single room with three large beds, which made for a cacophony of snores keeping me awake most of the night and frequent bruised ribs whenever one of my bedmates decided to turn over.

          So I’d sneak out of bed under the cover of the dark  — easy enough, since with chocolate-colored skin and coal-black eyes and hair, I tended to fade into the background at night.  

          Later, after Lord Oswald hired me away from Daddy’s farm, I found my ability to blend in to be detrimental to dealing with the governors, who tended to assume from my size that I was just some hired muscle, so one day early on in Oswald’s employ, in a fit of utter insanity, I dyed my short, curly black hair bright blue, the predominant color of the skies over my Daddy’s farm.  Coincidentally, as I soon found out, it was also the color the ladies from a particularly discriminating pleasure palace dyed their hair.  After my Lord’s initial shock and a good laugh at my expense when we walked into The Hen’s Coop that very night, I found to my Lord’s delight that it had the unintended benefit of confusing the governors immensely, so I’ve kept my hair blue.

          But, as a child, my hair was still jet black, and I’d stagger unseen, half-asleep, half-awake, the quarter mile or so to the south barn, where I could get some sleep in the pre-dawn silence.  I’d be up with the first rays of ambient sunlight splashing across my eyes, which gave me a few minutes for my only-child fantasy.

          Eventually, one of the roosters — there were two of them sharing a coop, each one somehow believing he was the only rooster around for miles — would stagger out of his coop directly below me and shriek a wakeup alarm.  The other rooster would blurt out a short quip, apparently surprised that there was another rooster around.  He’d crow even louder than the first.  Naturally, the first rooster, amazed that another rooster had encroached on his territory, responded even louder.  Before long, there was a din equaling the crowd’s noise when old Emperor Seraphim VI deigned to visit one of the eighty three planets in his empire.  Well, at least the crowd’s noise when his new Empress, Jewel, stepped out of the space-to-ground transport, in one of her famous shimmering, is-it-transparent-or-isn’t-it gowns and her long, black hair both fluttering about her shapely curves with every step.

          No, on second thought, the roosters were louder.

          Those dueling roosters signaled the start of my day for many years before Lord Oswald happened upon me. 

          Lord Adrian Oswald is actually a prince, one of the many heirs to the emperor — His Grace’s first wife’s sister’s grandson, to be exact — but he prefers to use the title Lord instead.  He says it’s less pretentious.

          A humbler man I’ve never met, perfectly satisfied with his position, with never a thought about advancement beyond the planetary governing of my Oasis.  Although, judging from the way he looks at the Empress Jewel, he’d be more than happy to accept a promotion to emperor if it includes the lovely Jewel as well.

          For nearly a decade now, I’ve been his personal secretary, keeping his appointments, scheduling his entertainments and frequent travels, sometimes even helping with battle strategy when the need arises.  Lord Oswald claims I have a knack for killing people in interesting ways, even if it’s just vicariously through the legion, Prince Oswald’s personally-selected planetary-wide defense troops.

          That’s not to say that I couldn’t kill someone personally.  I stand more than a head taller than most people, almost two heads more than Lord Oswald — even that tall pretty-boy Prince Vere, the emperor’s favorite heir and, not incidentally, grand-nephew, shrinks beside me — and my arms are as big around as a forty-foot elm tree.  Working on a farm for most of my childhood, I developed the muscles to match my size, so killing a man isn’t beyond my abilities.  I’ve just never done it.

          For the last half hour or so, I’d been listening to Lord Oswald’s regional governors bicker among themselves about who was entitled to what taxes and what kind of trade limitations were appropriate and other boring government crap.  I was reminded of the roosters back home on the farm, and I kept drifting away from the arguments, trying to decide if the governors were louder than the roosters or not, even though I was supposed to be taking minutes for the interminable meeting.

          The sound swelled and ebbed cyclically, hypnotically, until at last the spell was broken by the slam of a door.  The echo bounced around the hall in the ensuing silence as every eye in the room instantly found Lady Redwing standing by the only exit.  I glanced at my Lord, who looked ready to admonish the Lady for her interruption before wisely checking his watch.  When he realized what time it was, he merely shut his eyes to the Lady and massaged his temples in a vain attempt to ward off the inevitable headache that accompanied Lady Redwing’s Thursday afternoon visits.

More on the author’s glamorous life…

What? You didn’t know I had one?

Yesterday I engaged in Extreme Ironing and today I need to clean the house before I go away on a professional trip for two weeks. I’m attending Fencon and then staying over to teach a workshop in Bedford, TX. In between I hope – away from kids and cats and assorted other interruptions – to finish several works that are hanging by at thread and perhaps to get some sleep.

I know half of you are going to think it’s weird that I am engaging in housekeeping before leaving and the more daring of you will accuse me of being a downtrodden woman. Very funny. The truth is that our entire family is what can be euphemistically described as “driven.”

My husband, very generously decided to forego the chance to pursue his own artistic ambitions, so I could – sixteen years before I published a novel – which meant if we still wanted to have a comparable lifestyle to our peers, I picked up a lot of the slack. This involved a lot of stuff like ironing and cooking from scratch (yes, I know, but I REALLY cook from scratch) which is considered female-like and exploitative. It also includes furniture refinishing, wall painting and a lot of the other stuff. As for my husband, in addition to his more than 9-5 job he maintains all the computers in this house (I think ten, at last count) and does the taxes which take an unreasonable amount of time because my business is neither easy nor straightforward. Now we’re also trying to phase in some time for his writing, because it’s been years (since the kids became old enough to take considerable time) since he’s been able to do anything with it, and he’s really very good.

As for the kids, they’re teens and prickly, so I won’t go into their lives, but I think Robert is engaged in three or four different “enterprises” as well as keeping a 4.0 in pre-med, and Marsh is doing two or three things in addition to half/college and senior year in highschol, which these days seems to involve a year of sending out applications to colleges, each with the administrative/bureaucratic work load normally associated with filing a brief before the supreme court.

Our lives slot together very precisely to allow us to spend time together and to keep up with our conflicting commitments. That means if one of us is going to be away or incapacitated, it can throw everyone off. Papers don’t get filed with schools, novels get delayed or – and this is usually what happens when I get really sick – the house becomes the sort of screaming mess that takes me months to unravel afterwards.

Since this is not unexpected, I’m leaving some stuff done in advance, and then leaving them with specific charges on what to do. (Because I’m the one at home most of the time, I’m, by default, the manager.) Yes, they can iron (though since I got da machine, they don’t know how to operate that!) and they can clean and they can cook, but not to MY standards without supervision. And I don’t want to come back, after a con, and have to spend a week cleaning. So, today, I set things in order for them.

… which means I really don’t feel like writing a blog post, though it looks like I have…

So, I’ll close off with some stuff about the workshop.

The workshop is to help the Bedford library. (They pay my plane ticket, the rest goes to them.) I’ve done this three times and it’s a lot of fun. I honestly don’t have any idea if it’s full up or not, but if you’re going to be in the area it’s September 30^th to October 1^st. I have no idea how enrollment is this year, but if you’re in the area, look at http://www.bedfordlibrary.org The info should be there somewhere, and if it’s not send them an email.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have catboxes to clean.