Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

We’ve all heard that everything and everyone in the world is connected, and this is just as true in fiction as it is in real life. When creating a world, whether it’s fantasy or science fiction or paranormal, all the bits and pieces have to hold together and work together. All the spaces need to be filled in with the proper parts, and it all needs to mesh seamlessly or the made-up world will have a thoughtless, cardboard feel to it.

Contrary to what one might think, writing in a made-up world is not easier than writing in the real one. Hearing a writer say, “I love writing fantasy because you can just make everything up!” gets me cringing because anyone who can toss out that statement in a blithe, smiley-laden tone of type obviously hasn’t thought things through, and their story will probably end up set in a world which is a superficial collection of ill-fitting elements, most of which are likely to be off-the-shelf cliches, with huge gaps where the implications or ramifications of some earlier decision or creation clearly weren’t considered. No matter how gripping your plot is or how well-drawn the characters (and really, how well can you develop your characters if they sprang from a trainwreck of a setting?) the story as a whole can never be more than mediocre if the world it’s set in looks like it was made up on the fly by a writer who didn’t even know where her areas of weakness were.

Everything has to work, and work with everything else.

If the evil king who rules the land goes around every Sunday slaughtering peasants for sport, who’s doing the work as the working-class population dwindles? Who’s raising the crops and tending the animals and making the pots and chairs and horseshoes? For that matter, what’s preventing the peasants from high-tailing it out of there? If sticking around meant a good chance of being murdered by my own ruler, I personally would take my chances with any border guards, no matter how tough. They can’t surround the whole country — just ask the INS.

If a mediocre apprentice mage is cranking out magical cloaks (auto-heating!) and belts (protection from all animal bites, including mosquitos!) by the dozen as practice, then obviously magical items must be pretty darned easy to make. So why doesn’t everyone have one? Or several? Magic workings are part of the economy and if magic is common or easy then it has to have an impact on its society. And note that saying, “Well, all the mages promise to use their power only in time of Great Need” doesn’t hack it. Gandalf was sparing with his magic, but he was essentially an archangel; if your wizards are human then as a group they’ll include all the standard human weaknesses, including greed, selfishness, and the capacity for self-justification. Human nature is still human nature, even in a fantasy setting; if you’re going to change it, you need a very good reason and some bulletproof justification.

If vampires need to consume one adult person’s worth of blood per week to survive, that’s six quarts. You end up with a vampire who’s either killing someone every week (fifty-two murders per year) or leaving people alive by taking a pint at a time from twelve people per week (one quart = two pints) and spending a lot of time hunting/schmoozing. Even if your vampire is psychic and can make people forget they ever met him or her, they’re zapping the memories of 624 people per year. Either way, murder or mind-zapping, someone’s going to notice. I can see the headlines now, shrieking about some sort of new disease going around the city causing periods of memory loss, or speculating about a new kind of early-onset Altzheimer’s. If the writer wants the characters to have to deal with this sort of thing, then great. (Any vampire writers, feel free to grab the bunny.) And if they’re not zapping memories, than at least one of those 624 people is going to blab, no matter how charismatic or scary the vampire might be. If the writer just ignores all this, though, and the city is perfectly calm, business as usual, with no consequences for the marauding vampire, I’m going to be eyerolling pretty quickly.

And if the vampire turns someone, even if it’s only once per book, extrapolate that back for however many centuries or millenia vampires have existed, figure out about how many vampires there probably are in the world, and escalate the problem accordingly. Even the occasional Van Helsing with a satchel full of stakes isn’t going to be able to hold back that particular tide — how long before the human population dwindles to the point where the vampires are all going to starve to death?

This sort of economy of dwindling resources can be done and done well, and turned into an excellent story arc of its own. Jacqueline Lichtenberg wrote a series of SF books where the human race had mutated into two forms, one of which was a vampire-like predator who had to kill one of the other sort each month to survive. The predators started out as a minority population, but about halfway through the series (which covered centuries of future history) she addressed the problem of twelve deaths per year times a lengthening lifespan for the predators multiplied by an expanding predator population, and came up with what she called Zelerod’s Doom, named after the predator mathematician who ran the numbers and gave his people the extremely unwelcome news that Something Had To Be Done by a certain year or they were going to kill all the prey and then starve to death. It was a major plot point of the series and eventually forced a significant shift in the functioning of her society, with all the politics and wars and death and crises this sort of shift usually entails.

This is great worldbuilding, following the implications to their logical conclusion and then using that conclusion to tell an absorbing story. Note also that this sort of conflict would’ve rocked in a romance series — classic Romeo and Juliet stuff.

Not that this is the only way to do it. With some forethought and some time spent chasing down the implications of various aspects of your world, you can create a setting which is relatively stable, if you want to be able to put it in place and then not have to tinker with it over the course of your novel or series. But making sure it actually is stable, that all the parts mesh with each other without any noisy grinding of gears, does take planning and calculation. Considering aspects of society like the government and the economy and religion and the social order and the prevailing worldview of the people, and thinking about how they work together and how they might clash, can help a writer spot potential points of conflict or contradiction. If there’s magic or supernatural beings in the world, their impact needs to be considered. Even geography can be a key feature; the Vikings wouldn’t have gone viking if they’d lived in a rich, fertile land, while Japan wouldn’t have tried to conquer its neighbors if its islands had contained the coal and iron resources they needed to industrialize, and the Italian penninsula sticking out into the middle of the Mediterranean put it in a good position to control sea traffic across the Med for centuries.

Think about all the basic needs of the populace, food and shelter and other necessities, stability and security, trade and information and entertainment, and make sure your society provides these somehow. Any lacks can either be used to round out the story conflicts, or patched up and made to fit more smoothly, either one, but something needs to be done with them.

The fact is that creating a good fantasy or SF setting takes just as much work as researching a real-world historical setting. It’s just a different kind of work. Making up a system that functions, or several systems which function together, means understanding all those systems well enough to riff variations. Trying to make up a world without understanding what all the parts are and how they function is like a beginning music student picking up a trumpet and trying to play improv jazz — it doesn’t work, and the audience isn’t going to be terribly appreciative. You have to know how to follow the roads before you can start hacking your own path through the uncharted underbrush. Studying history and anthropology is a great place to begin, as is boning up on your sciences if you’re writing SF.

Worldbuilding can be a lot of fun, but you have to enjoy that kind of work, and doing the research required to build up a body of knowledge which will let you judge whether your basic concept is even viable. If the idea of all that groundwork is dismaying, then maybe you’d be better off with real-world settings where you can look things up. If popping the hood and learning how and why things work, and working out how different systems function and connect sounds like great fun, though, then chances are you’ll do a good job and enjoy the process. And your readers will appreciate the results.

The Boyfriend recently suggested to me that I like buying books more than I actually like reading them. A rather silly notion, to be sure, but all it took for him to arrive at this conclusion was a quick look at our home office. Let’s just say I have books pretty much stacked to the ceiling, although I think I’ve done a decent job corralling them into the walk-in closet.

I did concede that I do love buying books. There’s nothing quite like walking into a bookstore and looking at all the pretty, shiny possibilities. The pretty covers. The not-so-pretty covers. The unblemished spines. The “smell” of new books. There’s nothing quite like the thrill of the hunt, plus an unread book signifies hope. All of those unread books have potential.

That is what all my book hunting and buying boils down to – the search for The Next Great Read.

I said as much to The Boyfriend. As much as I like buying and hunting for books, I like reading a really great one a whole lot more. My exact words were “There’s nothing better than a really great book,” which is when his eyes started rolling back in his head. That pretty much put an end to the conversation, but not on me ruminating further…

Every reader has a “There’s Nothing Better” list. Themes, styles, autobuy authors, triggers that make really great reads for them. Here are a few of mine:

There’s nothing better than an edge-of-your-seat suspense novel written in first person.

There’s nothing better than discovering an author who excels in writing in the category format.

There’s nothing better than a great friends-to-lovers story.

There’s nothing better than a tearjerker, two-hanky, emotionally-draining western romance.

There’s nothing better than a “sweet” romance that doesn’t resort to preciousness.

There’s nothing better than a fabulous Harlequin Historical.

There’s nothing better than a sexy cowboy hero.

Avid readers become “avid,” because something triggers it for them. I think it all boils down to the “There’s Nothing Betters.” Those key elements, themes, and archetypes that speak directly to that individual reader.

What are some of your “There’s Nothing Betters?”

I was surprised and disappointed that there was no award given in 2007 for the “Veritas Award from the Romance Writers of America for outstanding journalism related to the romance genre. Surprised and disappointed because, well, not only is there a lot of incredible writing about romance fiction being done today, but some of the best writing and analysis about the publishing industry in general is coming from blogs with a decidedly romance bent.

How is that not a single winner could be found? In addition to Booksquare — which I humbly include in the category of great writing on industry issues (hey, if I can’t toot my own horn and all that) — we have, obviously, Romancing the Blog (which you obviously know about), Dear Author, Teach Me Tonight, and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (or if you’re old school, Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Books).

At least three of the sources cited above are read regularly by industry types who appreciate the forward-thinking, tech-savvy, well-considered thoughts being produced. For all of our hand-wringing about bringing respect to the romance industry, something wonderful is happening in the post-Romantic Times world: serious writing about the romance genre coupled with serious reviews of our novels (and some not-so-serious writing and reviews). Oh, and broader industry issues brought home to the romance business.

If you’re wondering what’s happening in the publishing industry and how it affects you — authors — the last place you’re looking is the RWA. The monthly magazine, RWR, doesn’t cover serious industry issues in a timely manner, and eNotes (the email newsletter for members) is hampered both by the publication schedule and, for lack of a better term, no-compete clause with RWR. I mean, Amazon just told POD publishers to use their service or else? How is RWA covering this issue? Given the lead time, can it cover this issue and offer something that hasn’t already been done?

Informed members of RWA are learning from other sources. Let’s consider some major issues being covered by these sites (these are recent items, not necessarily indicative of what was published in 2007): the Cassie Edwards plagiarism discovery (which was scary due to Edwards’ apparent cluelessness about stealing words, her publisher’s initial “meh” reaction, and the fact that her editors didn’t notice a shift in style and tone in her work), the Deborah Anne MacGillivary author/reviewer intimidation scandal (as a lagniappe, there’s the fact that she was apparently violating RWA rules by functioning as a publisher), and the recent Amazon decision regarding print-on-demand and BookSurge.

Sure there might have been a little schadenfreude associated with one or more of those stories, but, c’mon, these are big things impacting romance authors and readers, and while the process didn’t always meet the standards of traditional journalism, it sure beat silence on the topics.

I’m guessing it’s the process that lead to the “no award given” for 2007. This isn’t a high profile award, and, I suspect that most RWA members aren’t even aware that they are responsible for submitting articles for consideration. It’s a shame that we finally have reached a point where smart women and men are covering the romance genres from a variety of angles — academically, journalistically, analytically, and even humorously — yet the one award designed to recognize this effort will not be awarded due to lack of entries.

Maybe it’s time for the RWA to consider a better way of identifying and honoring this great work being done.

Change is not always that friendly buddy in the distance. Sometimes, it’s a force of reckoning. But no matter what we face, Change is inevitably headed your way.

Ironically, it’s not change itself that people fear. It’s more the results of change. If you move, how safe will the walk home be? How long will it take? If you decide on a different major, how much will it cost to begin again? If you change your partner, are you sure the new one will take on their fair share? People like exact answers and they get very nervous when they don’t have one available.

Maybe is a scary, scary word.

Folks get very concerned about what’s fair when change is part of the equation. As if somehow, they face a firing squad that will redecide where to aim. So when an author faces the decision of whether to write category or single title sized novels, it’s enough to make a reader quite nervous.

What if they drop my series? What if they change their style? What if when they writer bigger, they lose what I love about their work?

I’m not asking for an answer for reader concerns. But I do wonder, what goes into each author’s decision on what to write? Do you write category in order to build a readership to take to a Single Title market? Or did you start off in the ST Market because that’s what you’ve always wanted to do?

Just curious,
Dee

Happy Cinco de Mayo mi amigas y amigos!

Now that I got that out of the way let’s move on to my problem. I’ve always had a hard time setting goals. Short-term, long-term, you name it. I get palpitations at the thought of having to write down five year goals. It’s not that I don’t manage to accomplish things, I do. It’s just that the things I do accomplish rarely come from a list of items to be ticked off.

I do envy people who are good at setting goals and achieving them. I have friends who are so good at it they actually give talks on the subject. And yes, before you ask, I have attended their talks. I even wrote down some goals. Or at least I thought they were goals. Turns out some of my goals were actually aspirations. Writing five pages a day, every day is a goal. Making the New York Times Bestseller’s list is an aspiration. Who knew? Certainly not me until I took the goal writing class for the second time. Goals are things you have control over achieving. Aspirations, not so much.

I think the hardest thing about goal-setting is knowing what you want. You’d think that would be easy, but it’s not. At least not for me. I’m one of those people who really don’t know what they want. It’s much easier for me to tell you what I don’t want. I know, it says a lot about me. *g*

I do know that I want to keep writing supernatural romances and urban fantasies, but those things aren’t really goals. They’re also not aspirations. Scratches head. I’m not really sure where they fall. Hopefully by now you understand why I have such a problem with setting goals. For those of you who’ve mastered goal setting, how did you do it? If you don’t set goals, what do you do to get things accomplished?

by Monica McCarty

Recently I got into an interesting discussion with a reader on my blog about visualizing characters and how “real” we want them to be.

I love physical descriptions of the hero and heroine because it helps me form an image in my head that I can really hold on to. Subconsciously, I think I attach the description to someone I’ve seen before (usually an actor/actress). Without a description, it’s harder for me to connect with the character. I think it has to do with the way I read (and write for that matter)—I’m a “visualizer” and the story kind of unfolds like a movie in my head. Apparently I’m not alone, because the reader said she sees things the same way.

As a writer, I will often use a picture of a model/actor to help me visualize a particular character. For example, in HIGHLANDER UNCHAINED, Lachlan MacLean was Gerard Butler and Flora MacLeod was (a young) Elizabeth Taylor. I had a couple pictures of them by my computer to give me a little inspiration as I wrote. For me, the image has nothing to do with personality, it’s only about the physical description.

But is that too much information? Sometimes I hesitate to tell people who I had in mind because I don’t want to take the chance that (a) they don’t like that person and the image ruins the character for them or (b) they attribute more than the person’s physical description to the character.

Maybe there is someone out there who doesn’t think Gerard Butler is hot (unlikely, but always a possibility I suppose *g*) or who doesn’t like the way ET behaves off screen and attributes that to my character. I’ve been disappointed myself to find out that a character I loved (and had a strong mental image for) was completely different from who the author had in mind, and further, was someone who didn’t really appeal to me.

I have some writer friends who don’t like (and don’t do) detailed physical descriptions. As a reader (or writer) do you prefer a good physical description to help you visualize a character? As a reader do you want to know who the author was thinking of when she wrote the book? If you are a writer, do you use pictures to help you visualize your characters?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about books. Not my current reads, what’s in my TBR pile, or the new titles folks are buzzing about online. Instead, I’ve been thinking about other books, older books – the ones I read as a kid.

Like most girls, I loved the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder about frontier life (although Alonzo’s book was always my favorite). Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary … I enjoyed all the usual suspects. I read these books over and over and over again, focusing on my favorite scenes until the pages were worn and crinkled from use. (By the way, this voracious re-reading was made possible by my mom, who always took me to the library once a week when I was a kid. Thanks, Mom!)

Then, there were the other books I loved, the ones a little off the beaten path. Like Beauty by Robin McKinley. Silver by Norma Fox Mazer. Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. Or Rasco and the Rats of NIMH by Jane Leslie Conly. I don’t know how many times I read that last one, but I always thought it was better than the original book. I would have read Red Fern more than I did, if the ending didn’t always make me cry.

One of my absolute favorites growing up was the Wagons West series by Dana Fuller Ross. These historical novels about the settling of the American West had more than their share of action, adventure, violence, and romance. Not exactly your usual, sweet kids’ fare, but what can I say? I wanted to be a cowboy growing up, and these books vicariously filled that desire.

I’ve even been thinking about going back and re-reading some of these books – and I very rarely re-read these days. But every time I start to get one of these titles off my bookcase or from the library, I hesitate.

What’s stopping me? I worry that I’ll be disappointed. That the writing, the stories, the characters, won’t seem as magical to me now as they did when I was younger. That re-reading them now will tarnish my hazy, golden memories.

Still, I think I’m going to suck it up and just do it. Because books are treasures to be discovered again and again – no matter how old you are. Who knows? I might even enjoy these titles more – and maybe make some new memories for myself.

What about you? What are some of your favorite books you read as a child? Do you ever go back and re-read them? Why or why not?

This month, the first of a series of six books is out, and let me tell you, it’s not your usual continuity :0). All six of us are friends, writing about friends, who are wedding planners (we’ve chronicled our adventures on our own blog). A little over a year ago, I proposed the idea (no pun intended) of friends writing together about friends. I had the perfect group of friends in Myrna Mackenzie, Melissa McClone, Linda Goodnight, Susan Meier and Melissa James. They were all talented, fun authors who were chock-full of ideas, award winning, best-selling books, and several of them were authors I had worked with on other projects.

Nevertheless, when you propose something like this, you worry. I had had this first chapter of SWEETHEART LOST AND FOUND on my computer for a long time (it ended up becoming a later chapter, but if you read the book, it’s the poker scene, with several of the “girls” sitting around at Audra’s table, playing cards), and had just been looking for the right group of friends to assemble for the series. Then along came these five women, and when I sent the chapter out, they leapt on it with a brainstorming frenzy like I had never seen before.

We brought our completed proposal to editorial and wham, we had a half dozen contracts. Then we set about writing the books, always communicating frequently, running ideas, sometimes chapters, by each other. In the end, the entire series was a fun, collaborative process.

Sort of like being the wedding planners that our characters were. We created a “wedding” of books, merging our creative talents to bring together heroes and heroines into six happily ever afters. We had a blast, truly.

I don’t think I could have done this with just anyone, nor do I think the experience would have gone as smoothly with any old group of friends. Post-writing, we’ve done promotion together (like the blog), and that, too, has been a collaborative effort, with everyone working together (and filling in when someone has been sick, or traveling or just snowed under). It helps that we’re all authors and moms and we understand that life gets in the way, and can pop in, since there are so many of us, to take up the slack.

It’s like the best marriage of all. There are a half dozen creative minds brought together to do everything. And best of all?

No one gets in trouble for not changing the toilet paper roll, nor is there any laundry to do at the end of the day

Shirley

I was recently at the Romantic Times Book Lovers Convention, affectionately called “RT”. There were. some major glitches with the hotel being renovated . (I mean, really, 1500 women and NO bathroom on the main floor? You know, the floor with the restaurants and bar? Then no staircase to the second level, leaving the elevators jammed?) Aside from the mayhem of the reconstruction, the convention was one big party, and the prevalent theme throughout was all things paranormal.

I shared the elevator with a she-devil, vampire and zombie. I saw a dominatrix (Okay, maybe technically not paranormal, but certainly a fantasy) who looked like a hard-core dominate sex party from the neck down and a Sunday school teacher from the neck up. There were faeries and witches peppered in with the male models with little clothing.

All in all, it was a hoot. The fun party atmosphere prevailed, but I was taken with how the genre and conference has evolved, just how much emphasis and enthusiasm was placed on vampires and dark warriors and werewolves and the like. They could be good, or bad, but never ever ugly. From the book trailers playing on closed-circuit TV in my room, to the posters in the hallways, ghosts, devil-warriors, and vampires are hot! Paranormal seemed the prevalent theme, and you know what, I liked it. I’ve dabbled a bit in paranormal phenomena in my writing, but believe me, I’m a piker. These people believed. At least for one week.

Lisa Jackson
http://www.lisajackson.com
http://blog.lisajackson.com

Or is it?

Do you know what it means when someone slaps “Bestselling Author” on their web site, blog or book cover? How about “Nationally,” “USA Today,” or “NY Times” Bestseller? The first two are pretty vague. You can see how those might mean different things to different authors and publishers, but the last two? Those are clear cut, right? I mean, you either made the list in question or you didn’t. And if someone made the list, especially the grandaddy of lists, the NY Times, they’d be touting it everywhere, again…right?

Well, not necessarily. Here’s the weird thing. There is no industry standard for any of these terms. I know what you’re thinking, well, maybe the smaller presses don’t follow the same standard. They, after all, have a different marketing plan than the bigger guys (more online sales, etc.). But what about those big guys? Those NY publishers? They all go by the same rules–surely.

The simple answer is, No, they don’t.

Quick quiz: Author A makes the NY Times list at #20, Author B makes the list at #21. They are both NY Times Bestsellers, right? Well, maybe–depends on who their publisher is. Some publishers only recognize “making the list” if the author makes the print list, in other words the top 20. Some publishers recognize ANYWHERE on the list.

If you go to the NY Times’ web site, you’ll see they make a distinct distinction between top 20 and all others by a line and not saying “weeks on list” for those under top 20. RWA National also only puts authors on their “honor role” if they have made top 20 for the Times, top 50 for USA Today or top 15 for Publisher’s Weekly. Week to week they do list those who make an “extended” list, Border’s Group’s list, Barnes and Noble’s list, and Essence’s list. (Also Library Journal’s most borrowed list, but we are discussing bestSELLER lists today.)

Now let’s say that Author A is in an anthology with with a NY Times Bestselling author and the anthology hits anywhere on the list. Does that count? Do they get to go on from there calling themself a NY Times Bestselling Author? Sure, with some publishers…others–no way.

Bestselling? For some houses it means the author had to hit at least TWO of the big three, meaning NY Times, USA Today or Publishers Weekly. But we have all seen authors use this term who were no closer to any of those lists than I am to George Clooney right now. How is that? Because, simply some publishers have a definition for the term and some don’t. And some don’t care if an author uses the term to describe say being in the top 100 selling romance books set in Potosi, Missouri at Amazon for 10.2 seconds (or at least not enough to police it).

Nationally Bestselling? Well, Amazon sells nationwide…but again some houses limit the term. One I’ve heard is an author has to hit one of the major bricks and mortar bookseller lists.

So, what’s this tell you about the books? Not a lot. I mean we all know just because someone else likes a book doesn’t mean we will–or do we? Do you buy books because they made a list? Do you look at an author differently (with more respect) because they made a list? Does any of this make a rat’s patootie’s worth of difference to you? How about as an author? If you have made a list–anywhere on a list–does it bug you when someone else claims something your publisher won’t let you claim? Or how about when someone who you know never made any of the lists mentioned on RWA’s site, claims to be a “bestseller?” Bug you? Or no?