The Dark Side

I feel like I've gone over to the dark side. That image above? It's Liane's Kindle for PC.

You may go ahead and take my temperature. I'm the paper book stoic, the Luddite who dislikes e-books (the platform, that is) on principle - even when said principle gets a bit blurry at times. I don't like the way the digital evolution is throwing life-as-we-know-it into chaos. I don't like that the publishing industry is in a state of flux, although I acknowledge that there is much that's wrong with the status quo and that it's a wasteful, unsustainable model.

I have avowed time and again that I'd never pay hundreds of dollars for a Kindle or any other device of that ilk. Plus, the more I learn about Amazon, the more wary I am of their shenanigans. I deplore the fact that they started off selling Kindle versions of print books at significantly lower prices, then jacked the prices up to the print levels AND BEYOND as soon as they'd sold enough Kindles to establish their market. Compare the cost of producing a paper book to that of the e-version, factor in the price of the reading device, and those prices I see look an awful lot like the book-buying public is being, er, invaded up the, er, ear. For the sake of brevity and circumvention of rants, we won't even discuss the issue of royalty percentages on e-books published by the traditional houses.

Yet I downloaded the Kindle app. on to my laptop. I did it on impulse for practical reasons: (1) I wanted to buy a writer acquaintance's novel and the Kindle price, which she set herself, is a third of the print price (and even less when I factor in the shipping cost). (2) The Kindle for PC is free. (3) I'm flat out of shelf space. Since I'd already crossed the line, I checked out the free books and downloaded some classic novels I'd been wanting to read or reread for ages, including Madame Bovary, The Iliad, Passion in the Desert, A Christmas Carol and Aesop's Fables.

Reading books on my laptop will never be my poison of choice although this new babe of mine is small and light and I can get fairly comfy with it, even in bed. I still prefer to read 'real' books, which for me will always be made of paper.

I feel like a traitor to the paper book cause. I feel like a turncoat. Go ahead. Shoot me.

—Liane Spicer

Digesting Your Life

I recently had an e-mail exchange with a writer friend whose new soon to be published manuscript I’d just read. It was one of those fun favors, the latest in a book series I knew and enjoyed, by a writer whose work I love as much as I enjoy her friendship, a chance to do what most of her readers can’t, to share my feelings about the story as a reader and add a few words on I wanted to see while the book was still being formed.

In the course of giving her feedback, I asked her to read the prologue for the novel I’m currently working on, PAST LIFE: A Vampire Testament. It was a difficult chapter to write as it began with what looked like a scene of extreme child abuse, then rolled into a reversal that saved the victim and punished the victimizers.

In the course of setting up what I’d written, I revealed that the moment was based on something someone had told me years ago, a brief glimpse into the past of someone who was once a friend but who’d become so emotionally abusive I had to sever the relationship to survive.

Afterwards, I felt a flash of embarrassment and even guilt over having admitted to taking something real from someone’s life and making something fictional of it. I didn't want to seem as if I was cavalierly using an ex-friend's childhood confidences as pop art -- I knew she’d be thoroughly disguised by the time I was done. But it opened the door to the question -- where is the line? How much of real life can a writer put in their art before it becomes something else, something intrusive?

Terry McMillan’s ex-husband sued her when she wrote a novel that detailed the events of their marriage and break up more closely than he felt comfortable with -- but would anyone have even noticed if we hadn’t been drawn to the book by the headlines about the lawsuit? As soon as I heard about it I was tempted to run out and read it to see what she had to say about him, which would not have been my reaction without the news story.

Truman Capote’s last years were spent in isolation, rejected by the society friends who had pampered him for decades as their pet famous author, until he had the temerity to write a book based on his time with them, Answered Prayers. It's a brilliant unfinished work that is not so much gossiping about his wealthy friends as a look inside the heads and lives of a class most of us seldom get a chance to mix with. As he said in disbelief at their sense of betrayal, "I’m a writer! What did they think I did in my spare time? I observed life – and I wrote about it!”

Which sums it up for all us fiction and non-fiction writers. It is what we do. Writers are all vampires of a sort, in that we feed on our own pasts and the people around us for material. What we write can only be the sum of who we are and what we’ve experienced. It isn’t always pretty or pleasant. To a large degree, I see my characters as fragmented pieces of myself, mixed with assorted aspects of friends, family and people I’ve known, blended well and distilled into -- hopefully -- someone new and original that still rings real. That doesn’t mean that someone isn’t going to see a moment we shared or a snippet of something of themselves in my books. It’s inevitable.

“Write what you know” is what all beginning writers are told. Take events from your life that you understand well enough to use to represent your fictional world truthfully, even if not factually. As writers we have nothing else to use, other than research, and even that is always filtered through our own experiences. I’ve come to the conclusion that the only real rule we can use is the Hippocratic Oath -- to do no harm.

I’ve come to see “working from life”, as painters would say, as a therapeutic process. I’ve used more and more of the conflicted relationships in my life in my more recent and best writing. They aren’t always easy to look at, to write or to read, but for me the best material comes out of true events that disturb, scare or upset me, as much, if not more than the happy-happy joy-joy times. Do you remember the flavor of cake you had on your fifth birthday, or the kid who shoved you and took back his gift because he didn’t care what his mom said, damn it, he picked it out in the store and thought it was for him? Conflict is at the heart of all good stories, fiction or non-fiction.

Rather than using my work as a means of revenge or getting the last word, I find that when I draw on life I usually end up identifying with the characters I create in a way I never could with the original person. As I seek out their point of view, to be able to write them fairly and accurately, I often find myself reviewing the real relationship and what went wrong, from their side as well as mine.

By the time I'm done, I've often exorcised any original malice that may have driven me. Adam Caine from my first novel, BITE MARKS, is a fine example -- he is the repository of a great deal of cruelty and malice I've encountered or observed in many people over the years. I’ve seen his roots more clearly as I seek to find redemption for him over the course of the Testaments, and find ways to forgive his forebears.

I writing the prologue to PAST LIFE I found myself giving the lead character a voice I'd not heard in my memories of her real life source. I found tenderness for my fictionalization of her inner child that my anger at the end couldn't allow with the real person who'd injured me. As I wrote later chapters of her in adulthood I found myself discovering more insights into what she did in my past and why. The character will still be a villain -- have no doubt -- but a motivated one like Adam Caine, whose motives we understand and, like Hannibal Lechter, can almost identify with.

Getting there means going deep into memories of someone I cut out of my life, something I've never done lightly and only about four times in over fifty years of life on Earth. The journey is difficult, but already paying off as I see the character of Dr. Adeniké Morgan growing. She isn’t cardboard to me, but flesh and blood, and as I work on her, I see her becoming a character who will break new ground for me. Will Dr. Morgan’s source recognize herself if she picks up the book? I hope not, but if she does, I hope she will see what I saw -- a flawed human being, damaged by life, who was pushed down a path by life she might otherwise have avoided, but one I at least understand now, and can forgive, if not forget.

To me, writing should never be therapy forced down the throats of the reader as you try to figure yourself out -- but revealing insights understood after the fact can benefit the writer and the reader. Conclusions can bring closure for both. I will continue to use my life and research, and try not to feel like a vampire, but will also be mindful of the real world implications of doing so, and as I said, follow the edict to do no harm.

Getting the last word carries with it a responsibility to make those words of value, not vengeance.

Worldbuilding: Political and Economic Systems

It may be the lasting influence of George W. Bush's confused utterances. It may be due to students paying less attention in social studies class. Maybe I'm just more aware of it now that I experience books as a writer as well as a reader.

Whatever the reason, more and more often I see people conflate three very different concepts: capitalism, democracy, and liberty.

Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and the means of distribution. Workers are paid wages, and individuals and companies aim to make a profit.

Democracy is a political system in which the people govern, either directly or through representatives they elect.

Freedom is a philosophical concept. It has had many different meanings over the millennia, but at its essence has to do with the arenas in which people can behave as they choose and the arenas in which people are protected from oppression.

The United States is a representative democracy whose economy is rooted in capitalism and whose Constitution and its amendments guarantee certain freedoms and protections. Democracy, capitalism, and freedom are constantly evolving. For example, two hundred years ago in the United States, slaves and women could not vote, and poor children worked long hours for pitiful wages instead of going to school.

I'm not leading up to an attack on the Tea Party movement, although its members do seem quite confused about these concepts and their history. Rather, I want to encourage people who write historical and speculative fiction to think carefully about their extrapolations into the future or past. Too often, the stories and books I read don't hold water because the author takes as given the idea that capitalism and freedom are defaults, natural and good, rather than social constructs viewed differently by different people. How often have you read fantasies with a Bronze- or Iron-Age civilization with an apparent free-market economy with no explanation of how such an economy could have developed? How often have you read a fantasy or sf story in which a slave wants to be free, with no explanation of how they got such an alien idea in a society in which slavery is accepted and free people are in the minority?

I've barely skimmed the surface of the problem of American beliefs about democracy, capitalism, and freedom infecting fiction set in other places and time periods. I'll leave a fuller treatment to a grad student in need of a thesis topic.

I'll stop here by restating an argument I've made before in my NovelSpaces blog posts: Writers need to be well versed in many subjects, including the social sciences. Poor fiction results when people don't research or examine their personal beliefs and prejudices before worldbuilding.


I'll be blogging here again on October 21. Until then, may your writing be true to your world.

—Shauna Roberts

So, Sex Sells, huh?

So, sex sells, huh? We hear that all the time. The notion that if the word sex, or sexy content and images are involved, folks will hand over their full attention, and their money.

This might be the case when it comes to music, or advertising, as in this body wash ad with the sexy image. And yes, sexy images on book covers are standard, eye-catching ways to promote - some of my titles have very sexy covers. But, I want to set the record straight as far as how well a sex related book will actually sell, simply because it is categorized as erotica. It won't - the simple fact that it's erotica is not enough, and it can sometimes be a negative as opposed to a positive. It is an injustice to all erotica authors to assume this - that we can simply throw a few dirty words in a book and we're done. Writing erotica is a bold move, and writing erotica is not easy.

People have said that some authors switched genres to make money in this industry, and that they (we) decided to write erotica to please our publishers and to get on the "sex sells" bandwagon to make money. Well, I'm here to tell you that just because you write an erotica book, you are not automatically going to start pulling in the riches because you now use "P" words that place your titles into a "popular" genre. No matter how popular the genre might be, your book will not sell unless readers know about it through advertising or word of mouth, and it will not garner word of mouth if the writing is inferior. You must still craft a good story, sex or not, and write a page-turner, three-some or not. It's not about the sex, it's about the journey of the characters.

Writing erotica is not the magic road you can take to the land of riches. Deciding to write erotica is not as easy as one might think. A lot of factors must be taken into account. Some are internal, and others are about whether one can write a story that qualifies as erotica - not just one story, many stories, because just as with any genre, it can take a building of momentum to begin to get noticed.

I've written eleven books in many genres, including inspirational fiction, and erotica under the name PYNK, had numerous contracts, self-published as well - writing erotica is not a get rich quick scheme - we are all in the business together, working hard to reach the best-seller lists that will hopefully mean/lead to selling thousands, millions, billions of copies. It's not as easy as simply picking a genre. It's all about writing the book that people can't stop talking about, the one that garners tons of attention, the one that sells out and reprints, and ensures a royalty check is in the envelope along with that lonely royalty statement. Sometimes there's an accompanying check, and sometimes there's not!

In the meantime we write, hopefully because we love it. And we write to express the stories that we feel need to be told, whether romance, mainstream, mystery, or erotica. And though we categorize titles, we should not categorize each other. No matter what genre we write in, we are all authors living our passion, whether we sell or not. The books on the shelves are a smorgasbord of tastes - a plethora of sizes - a melting pot of colors. One does not suit all. Sexy cover or not.

So, sex sells, huh?

Writing like Tony Danza

Friday night my wife and I watched the first episode of actor Tony Danza's documentary series that follows him through his effort to become a high-school English teacher. As an educator I cringed throughout most of his ordeal; there were moments when I had to look away from the screen. Because Mr. Danza was so afraid of not being liked by his students that he invested most of his energy into trying to gain their approval. Worse, from my standpoint, his soul-searching video diary entries were about how to get the children in his class to like him. True, his sincere intention was to do his best to educate his class of tenth-graders, BUT he was proceeding from the assumption he could not do his job unless they liked him.

This is a common misconception among new teachers. Actually, it's a problem with too many teachers who should know better as well. Teaching is not about students liking you – and being able to educate has nothing to do with popularity. What you do to reach your students, to motivate them, and to encourage them to raise their own standards, is teach. Do your job well – know what you're talking about, convey your knowledge clearly, let them know how to apply that knowledge, and then set high expectations for their performance. Your students may never like you, but they will learn from you and they will leave your class equipped with knowledge and skills that will help them meet their next challenge.

A key element in being an effective educator is something most teachers fresh from college don't have: Confidence in your knowledge and your abilities. And you have to respect your students without being intimidated by them – or by the challenge of teaching them.

Those two elements are as important to writers as they are to educators. Don't worry about whether your reader will like you. Do not try to change how you present yourself or how you write (or what you write) to please someone else. Do your job well, tell your stories the best way you know how, and let your work speak for itself.

Liane Spicer and I exchanged a couple of e-mails about editors and the adjustments they sometimes make to our prose not too long ago. An example I did not think of then appears in the first chapter of Wolf Hunters. An injured character is brought into the infirmary and the medic, I wrote: "pulled the stethoscope from about his neck and levered the earpieces in." My editor changed the end of that sentence to "into his ears." My second thought in seeing those added words was that my editor did not trust the reader to know where a doctor would put the earpieces of his stethoscope. My first thought was recognition: I'd originally ended the sentence just that way. Not because I didn't trust the intelligence of my reader, but because I did not trust my ability to present even a common action clearly.

Writer Una McCormack recently posted a column on craft and balance in what she called the nuts and bolts – of storytelling. She was speaking in particular about well-constructed sentences and how a poorly written sentence can throw a reader right out of your story.

She chose as an example of an unbalanced sentence the opening line from the second novel in a popular series of historical mysteries set in the seventh century:
"The night was warm and fragrant; but as oppressively scented as only a Roman summer’s night can frequently be."
Ms McCormack wrote: "With that 'frequently', I am lost. Because that single word gives me a glimpse into the author’s mind as he writes, and I sense him second-guess himself … and his sentence – already heavy with adverbs – collapses with the weight of yet another, and with the burden of the author’s moment of self-doubt."

That self-doubt is the key. Perhaps the poor construction of that sentence could throw a reader out of the story, but the underlying cause of that poor construction is "the author's moment of self-doubt."

Doubting yourself is normal; it's part of every risk you take. And writing – like marrying and teaching and just about every important thing you will ever do – is a risk. A healthy amount of self-doubt makes you double check your safety lines, give your best work a second inspection, and practice just a bit harder to hone your skills. Too much doubt, however, can paralyze you. Or worse, weaken your prose. By making you over-explain, or equivocate, or hold back to avoid offense, or choose your words based on what you think others would want you to say.

Never doubting yourself is hubris. But don't let doubt weaken your words.

You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby!

I do the bulk of my writing on a netbook that slides easily into my purse.



Nowadays, it’s hard to believe I once considered this my lean, mean writing machine:

Smith-Corona PWP

Come on, I can’t be the only one out there who remembers life before everyone had a personal computer on their desk.

What was your first writing machine?

Research in the Internet Age

This week I came to appreciate just how lucky I am to be writing during the Internet age. I recently started the research and plotting phase of my latest work-in-progress, and for the first time, the story I’m working on is set in a location I’ve never visited: Hawaii.

I’d love to hop on a plane and fly to Hawaii to conduct research, but let’s be honest, I can hardly afford to drive to the next town, let alone make it to Hawaii. I’ve reluctantly accepted that I will have to conduct all of my research online. How depressing!

But wait? What would I do if I didn’t have the Internet? *cue blood-curdling scream*

It is hard to imagine how tough it would be to write this book without the convenience of having tons of information at my fingertips. What would my options be? Going to the library and pulling a dusty Encyclopedia Britannica from the shelf? Spending a small fortune on travel guides at the bookstore? Visiting travel agencies for brochures? Calling the Hawaiian Visitor’s Bureau and waiting weeks for a 50-page booklet that gives just the barest overview of the entire state?

Through websites such as TripAdvisor, I’ve found hundreds of pictures of the resort where my characters will be staying, along with firsthand descriptions from vacationers. Being such a popular destination, there are literally thousands of websites with endless lists of things to do on the beautiful islands of Hawaii.

So, while I would love to be lounging on white sand with a fruity alcoholic beverage in hand (and my trusty netbook for taking notes, of course), I am ever so grateful for this amazing tool that brings Hawaii into my small office in Austin.

What are some of the best research tools who’ve found when researching a setting that you can’t visit personally?