Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

My mother started lending me her historical romances when I was twelve, back in ‘75, and I read almost exclusively historicals for about the next twenty years. Even now, they’re one of my favorite subgenres on the het side, having only recently been overtaken by paranormals. (Although the time travel romance, a subgenre closely related to historicals which was incredibly popular for about a decade starting in the mid-eighties, was right up there during its heyday.)

One thing I’ve always noticed, though, is that the historical subgenre limits itself — or most of itself, call it 80-90% of the releases — to a relative few times and places in history. Regency England seems to be still the most popular, despite a bit of grumbling recently. Medieval England or France has always been popular as well, with an occasional Crusades book, usually set partially in England or France and partly in the Holy Land. And American West books, usually mid- to late-19th century, have been pretty steadily popular. And those are pretty much the majority of the subgenre.

The biggest chunk of what’s left goes to slightly longer list of times/places, although with far fewer books in each era than those above. Scottish Clan books — usually set in the 18th century — have a cyclical popularity, as do Viking books, usually set in the mid-Middle Ages. American Civil War books have periods of popularity, and I remember a smallish flurry of War of 1812 books back in the ’80s. Pirate books, again mostly 18th century, although hardly qualifying as historical the way they tend to be treated, have a thread of popularity, sometimes thicker and sometimes thinner. Same with Harem/Sheik books, set in varying eras and with wildly varying standards of accuracy. And Jo Beverley seems to’ve been keeping Georgian England alive pretty much by herself for the last twenty years.

And… that’s pretty much it, really, for the big New York publishers. (The smaller presses are willing to take chances on other settings, which is excellent, but for the majority of romance readers who still get their books from brick-and-mortar bookstores, those small presses might as well not exist yet.) Unless I’m missing something — which I might be, and feel free to chime in in comments if I’ve forgotten anything major — the entire rest of the history of the world clings to a few percentage points of the subgenre.

From my own reading, I remember three books set in ancient Egypt, all by the same writer, and a few books set in 19th century Australia, also all by the same author. A book set in 19th century China, one book set in 19th century Mexico, another 19th century book set partially in England and partially in Poland, and one set in 19th century India. One in pre-conquest Hawaii, either 18th or 19th century, I forget which. A couple set in 18th or 19th century Russia, by the same author. One set in Renaissance Florence and Rome, 15th century IIRC. And one set in ancient Babylon — the Girl was a Sumerian physician and the Guy was a Babylonian soldier, good stuff.

A relatively tiny number of settings, and mostly recent history. (Yes, I consider the 19th century to be “recent;” I was a medievalist, I can’t help it. [grin])

I’ve always wondered why the distribution is so uneven. I’ll admit I love English Regencies and medieval England and France as much as anyone, but there were a lot of other places around Europe where things were happening during the Middle Ages. And how about the Renaissance? That was a incredibly dynamic period with all sorts of things going on, war and peace and invention, trade and conflict and social change, and the Italian states weren’t the only ones to experience it.

How about the ancient world? Ancient Mesopotamia can support more than one story, surely. And how about ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Egypt, Carthage, Timbuktu, Great Zimbabwe? India was interesting well before the British took over, as was China — China’s a huge country encompassing a wide diversity of lands and peoples, and India almost as much so. Korea, Japan, the Southeast Asian patchwork — I don’t know much about that area, but I’d love to read books about those lands, especially if the books were set pre-colonial. I’d also love to see pre-Columbian America used, especially the old city-states and empires, the Aztecs, the Maya, the Olmecs and Toltecs and Inca.

These could be wonderfully rich settings — why aren’t there books set in these places and eras?

I know some settings don’t have a lot of research material; I have a semi-back-burnered project of my own set in pre-Islamic Arabia, and sources in English are few and far between. That can be a problem for some settings, it’s true.

But Renaissance Italy (just as an example) has reams of reference material available in English, and still gets only a token handful of romances. There’s plenty of material on medieval Japan, and early medieval Europe east of France, and Indian history well before the British Raj, just thinking of times/places I took classes on while at university. We had plenty of material to get through, primary as well as secondary, so the lack of romances with these settings doesn’t stem from a lack of research material.

Are the bulk of the historical romance writers just not interested? Are the bulk of the readers just not interested? Is it the publishers who are afraid to take chances with settings which haven’t sold a bazillion books before?

What would you like to see in a historical, that you’ve never seen or have only seen a couple of times? If you could decide what the next Big Popular Setting would be, so you could have a few dozen books set in your favorite time/place, when and where would it be?

My mother taught me to crochet when I was six.  She showed me how to make a loop and put it on the hook, then how to draw the yarn through the loop to make a chain.  Then she showed me how to stick the hook back into the chain and pull loops through that.  That was it — just the most basic of techniques.

From that point on she kept me in yarn and I made all kinds of things.  I’d play around with looping and sticking and pulling in various places and numbers and combinations, and come up with a “stitch” that turned into a flower or a doll’s skirt or a hat or whatever.  It was pure exploration and creativity, and although I couldn’t have followed a pattern if you paid me, and I had some trouble getting round shapes to actually lie flat (flowers could be ruffly, and doll skirts were supposed to flare, but flat was tricky) there were plenty of things I could make and I had great fun doing it.

When I was twelve I took a class at school called “Stitchery” and one of the things they taught was crochet.  I learned the “real” stitches there, and how to follow a pattern.  I learned a lot in that class, and while I can still start with a hook and yarn (or thread) and just make something up if I want to, I’m consciously using this or that stitch or combination of stitches.  I lost the ability to think purely in loops and sticks and pulls.  I can’t not see and think in the real, official stitches, and that wonderfully chaotic creativity of my childhood crocheting is gone, but if I start out with some goal in mind, my knowledge of the craft is more likely to get me there than my blind experimentation of earlier, no matter how much fun I was having at the time.

I do still have the ability to freestyle, though, and it was only later that I realized most crocheters can’t.  And if my mother had started out by teaching me the stitches, and showed me how to follow appropriate beginner patterns, I don’t know that I’d have ever been able to learn to just make things up.  Certainly it would’ve taken a lot more conscious study and practice to get to that level, which experts and designers have but so few casual crocheters do.  So although I’ve lost a certain point of view, a crocheting “innocence” if you will, I still gained something invaluable from that early, chaotic exploration.

I learned to write the same way.  I’d been an avid reader for about as long as I’d been crocheting, and started writing not long after.  My first stories were written in pencil in notebooks.  I rarely finished them, but I had ideas about characters and things they’d do, and I did a lot of experimenting and exploration, completely unfettered by rules or boundaries or ideas about what a story was or how to go about creating one.  It wasn’t until I got into high school that I took a creative writing class, and bought some writing books and magazines, and started to study plot and character, genre and theme, dialogue and transition.

With writing, my earlier experience seemed like a hinderance for a while.  Not at the time, of course — I was sure I knew how all this stuff worked and fought my teachers at every step!  But looking back, it did take me a lot longer to learn the more formal mechanics and craftsmanship than it would’ve if I’d come in cold.  If I’d been more open to the instruction, I’m sure I’d have picked up on all that much more quickly.

Now, whether I’m reading or writing, I see protagonists and supporting characters, goals and obstacles, point of view and pacing and structure.  I can’t not see these things, now that I’ve learned them, and no matter what I’m writing, it’s constructed from the official building blocks, even when the words are flowing and I feel like I’m just transcribing the play running through my mind.

The years of freestyling let me see all the rules and elements as tools rather than immutable laws, though.  They help you get where you want to go, but they’re not valuable alone, for their own sake, any more than the ultimate point of crochet is the yarn-over or the double crochet.  The point is always the product, not the process, whether you’re making a doll skirt or writing a romance.

For people who’d like to learn to write, my advice would be to start writing.  Leave the books and articles and classes alone for a while and just explore.  See what you can do, what comes out of your pencil or pen or keyboard.  You don’t have to show it to anyone.  You don’t even have to finish; if a story peters out or sputters to a stop, that’s all right; set it aside and start something new.  Just see what comes, and have fun doing it.  Then, when you have some idea of what you want to do and where you want to go, learn what the official building blocks look like, what everything’s called and how the experts say they should go together.  All of that is important, yes, but the memory of just letting the story in your head carry you along to wherever it wanted to go that day will help you keep your focus where it should be — on the story, not the stitches.

Angie

I have Issues with letting go of things, particularly books.

I’ve always been a bit of a packrat, mind you, and books have always been one of my obsessions. (Which I’m sure isn’t any kind of a surprise to anyone.) I take good care of my books, to the point where you could grab any paperback I’ve ever bought new and put it back on a bookstore shelf and no one would know the difference, and that includes the old favorites I’ve read five or ten times. I’m careful of who I lend them to for this reason. (I don’t lend paperbacks to my mother, an unrepentant spine-creaser, and haven’t since I was about twenty. And even before that I practiced passive discouragement by putting all my romances on the top shelves of my wall unit, double-shelved with the front row spine-up, so you had to stand on a chair to see the titles. Mom didn’t want to stand on my rolling office chair to browse through my books, and she eventually gave up coming into my room to look through them. Oh, well — sorry. [teenage Angie carefully maintains a straight face])

Then back in 1990, I experienced an Incident which resulted in my losing most of my possessions. It wasn’t a fire or a flood, which is what most people tend to guess. What happened was that I trusted someone I shouldn’t have, and ended up some months later with the clothes I stood up in plus a suitcase half-full of T-shirts and panties, which he’d packed for me so I didn’t even get to choose my own half-full suitcase of stuff to go home with. That’s another story, fairly long and complicated, but the point is that I know what it’s like to suddenly have everything taken away.

I’ve replaced a lot of my old books since then, but most I haven’t. And what I have now, at age forty-six, is just under twenty years’ worth of Stuff, including books. I have no childhood favorites, no remnants of past interests and projects and obsessions, none of the books that came in beat-up boxes out of distant relatives’ attics, most of which I’d treasured — even the old texbooks and readers, because 1) no one was making me read them, and 2) they were so different from the readers I was familiar with.

I had a pair of nursing textbooks from the very early 20th century, passed on to me by an elderly friend of a great-aunt. I have no idea why she gave them to me, since I’ve never particularly wanted to be a nurse, but the information in them was fascinating, from the quaint italicization of the word “vitamin” from back when it was still a new concept, one of those difficult, medical words; to the outrageous idea that a patient with syphillis should never be told what they have, that instead they should be jollied along with false promises and reassurances until they fell into madness and died; to the horrifying (particularly to me at eighteen or twenty) descriptions (with drawings!) of the various things which can go wrong during a pregnancy. I loved taking them down and looking through them again, reading this or that section, and did so every handful of years while I had them. Now, I don’t even remember the titles or publishers, to try to replace them, on the odd chance that one or the other might show up in a used bookstore.

My collections of Heinlein and Asimov and Foster and Hogan, of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Jo Beverley and Mary Balogh and Claudette Williams, out-of-print history books found one at a time in used bookstores, small press science fiction and fantasy books bought from specialty dealers at SF conventions — everything was gone and I’ve only re-acquired a tiny fraction.

Now, my husband is in the process of changing jobs, and we’re going to be moving from Long Beach to Seattle. And of course, moving means weeding through all the accumulated clutter and donating or pitching as much of it as possible. I haven’t started yet, although my husband has been working on his own piles. I just don’t have very much that I feel like I want to lose, even though I know intellectually that there are things I should get rid of, even books I’ll never read again, or haven’t read and likely won’t.

For a few years I was combing eBay, back when it wasn’t just an outlet for commercial retailers, when you could still buy odd and unusual things from individuals for a decent price. People used to offer sets of ten or twelve books for three to five dollars; at that price it was worth buying even if there were only one or two books in the set that I wanted. So I’d see a book I’d lost — one of Maggie Gladstone’s The Lacebridge Ladies books, or an old Ellen Fitzgerald — and I’d grab the lot. I know I got a lot of other books I have little or no interest in this way, and I really need to get rid of them. Or maybe some of them. They’re all Regencies, after all, and about the same vintage, so even if the “extras” weren’t old favorites, I’d probably enjoy them, right?

And after all, there were a lot of books in my pre-1990 collection which I was pretty sure I’d never read again too. And since then I’ve found myself remembering this or that book and wanting to read it, with a new interest sparked by some new experience or project or a mention by another reader. So you never know, do you? And when you’re talking about something like a book, which eventually goes out of print and becomes difficult or expensive to find again, well, it’s not like getting rid of an egg slicer or a needle threader and then finding a year or three later that you really wish you hadn’t. That’s easy enough to fix, for the cost of a trip to the store and a trivial amount of change. Books are different.

We are moving, though, and I’m sure that one day soon my brain will override my heart and I’ll start going through the shelves and stacks and boxes, and I’ll manage to pull out at least a few. Dumping old clothes and kitchen things will be easier, of course, and I’ll probably do that first. But eventually, I’ll come up with a few stacks of books I’m pretty sure I won’t want to read again, and I’ll donate them to the library or give them to Goodwill.

But no matter what my head tells me, no matter how reasonable or logical or necessary it is, I know it’ll be hard. Because after all, these are books we’re talking about.

Angie

One of the things I like very much about the m/m end of the field is that things aren’t quite so strongly defined as they are on the het end. Maybe it’s because this is still a relatively new chunk of the genre, but there’s more flexibility among the publishers, less calcification in the rules and expectations and assumptions. Writers can do something different, such as begin a couple’s relationship in book one and not give you a final HEA until book five. Or give you a complete romance in one book and then further adventures in later books which aren’t romances by definition — and therefore couldn’t be published by a traditional het romance publisher — but which are enjoyable anyway.

I remember when I first got into reading (het) romances, running into some series where the guy and the girl meet, have problems, cuss each other out and give each other a few black eyes or whatever, then admit they love each other 1.3 pages before the end of the book. Then there’s another book about them, some (usually ridiculous) misunderstanding occurs, and it was all cussing and fighting for the next 382 pages until they worked it out and were all in love again at the end. Remember Rosemary Rogers’ Steve and Ginny books? I opened up the third one, got to the cussing and fighting and breaking up again within the first chapter or so, eyerolled and tossed it. Luckily it was my mother’s book and I hadn’t spent any of my own money on it.

It’s annoying, and we don’t see that much anymore (or at least I haven’t, and I’m not complaining at all) but Ms. Rogers was trying to fill a market niche which is essentially impossible to fill in the traditional, rigid het romance. Many readers do enjoy seeing their favorite characters over again in later books, and yet unless they fall out of love, or otherwise find their relationship in serious jeopardy for whatever reason the writer can come up with, their next book is not and can not be an actual romance. If the main plotline isn’t about them facing some conflict which threatens their relationship, then it’s not a romance and a romance publisher won’t take it. And yet showing favorite characters breaking up and making up over and over is something which appeals to a limited audience.

Having previous characters show up with cameos in later books which are actually about a new couple works, but it’s unsatisfying to the reader who really wants to see the first couple. It doesn’t really fulfill the wish of the Joe/Mary fan to see another Joe/Mary story unless there’s a lot of Joe and Mary. But if there is a lot of Joe and Mary, it takes away from the new Bob/Sue story and anyone who’s absorbed in Bob and Sue’s romantic plotline gets impatient when Joe and Mary are hogging the spotlight. It can be done, but it’s always a tightrope walk and never really completely satisfying.

On the m/m side of the fence, though, the rules aren’t as rigid. If a writer wants to show us Joe and Bob’s romance in book one, then give us three more books about what they’re doing, where the plotline focuses on something else and our still-in-love couple are working together to solve whatever the outside problems are, that’s cool and there are publishers who’ll take the whole series. To me, that’s a feature rather than a bug, so long as readers know what they’re getting so those who only want to read genre-definition romances can pass on the sequels. The flexibility to try new things and push the boundaries is one of the things I love about m/m romance.

I really wish the het side of the genre could do it too, though.

I can think of the occasional romance which pulled this off — one of my favorites was Joyce Verette’s Dawn of Desire, set in ancient Egypt. (It’s a great romance, and if you like historicals but are tired of medievals and Regencies I highly recommend digging up a used copy.) In the sequel, Desert Fires, the Guy is struck down by a paralyzing curse and they set off on a quest to find Atlantis where there might be a cure for him. Okay, it’s not that historical [cough] but it was a great story with characters I came to love, including a number of the supporting cast. And because the Guy was on his way to dying, his relationship with the Girl was threatened pretty seriously, which qualified this second book as a romance without having the characters temporarily break up over something ridiculous.

For the most part, though, we just don’t see this kind of sequel. The requirement that each book published by a romance press be an actual genre romance precludes the sort of series where the first book is the romance itself and subsequent books are adventures or mysteries or whatever, featuring the original two characters.

So instead we have to go to other genres to get our whole-series-about-these-characters fix. But in other genres there’s rarely a strong romance in the series anywhere. SF/Fantasy writers are getting good at producing genre-definition romances in SF or Fantasy settings, but there still aren’t all that many. Monica Ferris, who writes the only mystery series I follow (cozy mysteries where the protag owns a needlework shop — the first one is Crewel World) has added a love interest, but it’s incredibly low-key and the guy doesn’t even show up in every book. There are other off-genre series which include a romantic subplot, but it usually doesn’t have much oomph to someone who’s used to the good stuff. So…?

Am I the only one who likes this kind of series? I’d love to see some small presses start doing for het romance characters what we’ve already got on the m/m side — the flexibility to cross genres with a single series if we want to, without having to change publishers. I’m not expecting it to happen any time soon, although this is one of those issues where I’d love to be mistaken.

A recent controversy seeping around the writing end of the blogosphere got me thinking about what writers owe to their readers.

[In case you missed this one, briefly, a bestselling fantasy writer missed a deadline on the fourth book in an incredibly popular series, then when it was finally published, announced in public that the book had been split in two and the second half would be published "shortly," mentioning the end of 2006. He hasn't finished it yet, and some of his fans are getting angry to the point of attacking him for posting in his blog about watching football, going to conventions, taking on editing jobs, etc., on the grounds that he's wasting time he should be spending on finishing the darned book. There are loud people both attacking and defending him.]

Who’s involved isn’t really important, and I don’t want to add to the pressure the writer is feeling by pointing a finger directly at him, especially since he’s stated that there are many helpful [cough] people e-mailing him links to blog and forum posts which mention him. I’m more interested in the general concept here anyway.

So, what do writers owe to their readers?

This gets complicated, actually.

It’s easy to say that a writer offers the product of their creative work, whatever sort of product their creativity has inspired them to produce this week or month or year, and the readers either buy the current book if they think they’ll like it, or don’t if they think they’ll dislike it, and… that’s pretty much it. Readers vote with their wallets, and that’s all the say they get in how or what a writer produces. Many people have come down on the “Writers don’t owe their readers squat except what they choose to give them” side. In principle, I’m firmly in favor of this concept myself, because writing isn’t a democratic sort of activity and if the writer is going to be nagged and dictated to, there are jobs which include nagging and dictating which pay a heck of a lot better.

I’ve seen readers say some pretty nasty things to or about writers, in public, when they’ve done something like change genres or subgenres. Within romance, I’ve seen some pretty cutting criticism over the years of writers who’ve written only sweet romances before but decide to try a sexy one, or writers who’ve written contemporaries for a while then shifted to paranormal. I can even understand where these readers are coming from — for my first twenty-some years of reading romances, I read historicals and only historicals. I had no interest in contemporaries, paranormals didn’t really exist yet (with rare exceptions like The Elsingham Portrait, which was marketed as a historical) and to someone who’d been an SF fan longer than she’d been a romance fan, all the books published in the then-new “futuristic” subgenre… well, let’s say there was quite a lot to be desired there. So when Judith McNaught, one of my very favorite historical romance writers, shifted over to contemporaries, I was terribly disappointed. I read her first few contemps, and did enjoy them, but on the whole they just weren’t the same and I fell away from buying her books.

So do I think I was somehow entitled to have one of my favorite writers keep writing the kind of books I preferred? Not at all. I was entitled to feel that disappointment, since we’re all entitled to our own feelings and reactions, but there’s a difference between saying “I’m sorry this happened,” and saying, “She should do what I want, because I want it.” Expressing my disappointment at never having another McNaught historical to read is very different from trying to control what Ms. McNaught does. (And yes, making nasty cracks about an author’s intelligence or judgement is an attempt to get them to change their behavior, if only indirectly.)

As a writer myself I can certainly understand another writer’s desire to do something new and different. I write in several different subgenres myself, and probably always will. No matter what I hear about the need to “brand” oneself, or how much logical sense it makes from a business POV, I can’t confine myself to just one type of story. So despite being sorry that one of my favorite authors had left my preferred subgenre, I understood even then her desire to branch out and explore some fresh territory.

And the same goes if a writer just decides to stop writing. It’s fine to be sad and even upset about it, but that’s different from attacking the author and trying to force him to change his mind just to please you. Maybe he doesn’t have any more books in him — some well known authors, such as Harper Lee, only had one book in them and it doesn’t make them any less writers. (And in Ms. Lee’s case, that one book was a doozy.) Maybe her life has changed and other priorities forced writing off the to-do list, for whatever reason. Or maybe he just decided “That’s enough, time to do something else.” Explanations are nice and might help disappointed fans understand, but we fans aren’t actually owed any such thing.

The situation changes, though, when you’re talking about a series.

Not necessarily every series, mind. Jo Beverley could decide never to write another Rogues book, and while I’d be terribly disappointed (because they rock), she doesn’t leave huge cliffhangers at the ends of her books. Sure, there are usually a few random unmarried people hanging about, and it’s fun to try to guess who’s going to get their own book next, but we won’t suffer great pangs of unfulfilled curiosity about how Lord Joe (whom we’ve come to know and love) is going to escape that French prison, or whatever. Each book leaves things more or less wrapped; there are holes for sequels, but not gaping, crumbling chasms.

It’s different, though, with a series which has a coherent story arc, where there’s a single storyline you’re following from book to book, making a set of X number of books into one super-novel. The sort of series where, if you start reading with Book Three, you’ll have no clue what’s going on because what happened before matters and there’s only a vague reference to earlier events to help remind people who read One and Two about what happened. New readers are… well, hopefully new readers will be able to find a copy of Book One and start where they’re supposed to. Those kinds of series do, in my opinion, contain an implied contract or promise between the writer and the readers. As a reader, I’m investing my time and attention and emotional energy in getting to know the characters and the setting and the goals and obstacles, and the writer promises to give me a satisfying story all the way to the end. Notice that I used the singular there — in this kind of series, it is actually one story, even if it’s divided up into some number of books, and even if each book ends at some sort of logical resting place; it’s clear to the reader that this is a pause, not an ending, and there’s more to the (singular) story arc.

In a case like this, I think it’s quite reasonable for readers to get upset if they’re left hanging.

Sure, a writer can decide to do whatever she likes, including just wandering away from a clearly unfinished series. But if she makes that decision, she has no reason to act surprised if her readers get angry, and even express that anger in her direction. She led them on, in a sense, and then didn’t fulfill her end of that implied contract.

Which isn’t to say that this isn’t ever going to happen, or that when it does the writer is clearly some sort of villain. Writing isn’t a precise craft, and with the best intentions in the world, sometimes a writer is going to find that the story they’re telling just dead-ends in the weeds and there’s nothing they can do about it. If this happens on a stand-alone book, well, that’s a shame in that it represents however much lost time the author had invested in the writing, but at least the readers weren’t halfway through it and clamoring for more at the time. The writer’s lost a lot of time and effort, but hasn’t lost a lot of reader good will.

When it happens in the middle of a coherent-arc series, though, it’s bad for everyone. It’s exactly like giving your readers half a novel and then no more; of course they’re going to be upset. The readers will feel cheated, the writer will feel pressured and guilty, and it turns into this huge social whirlpool of suck.

So what to do?

From the writer’s POV, I think one obvious lesson here is to not tell your readers when the next book is going to be finished until it actually is. “I’ll be done by Christmas,” is bad. “I just turned it in and the publisher says it’ll be in stores by Christmas,” works fine. (Or if it doesn’t, at least the readers won’t be angry with the writer.)

A good illustration of this is the Childe Cycle, by Gordon R. Dickson, a prominent SF/Fantasy writer. Dickson always said that the Childe Cycle would consist of nine books — three historicals, three contemporaries and three set in the future. He wrote the future trilogy first and it became the backbone of the Dorsai books, an incredibly popular SF series. (If you enjoy watching Miles Vorkosigan conquer entire fleets with three friends, an empty gun and a piece of string, try Tactics of Mistake; Cletus Grahame isn’t as wonderfully personable as Miles, but he’s a similarly brilliant tactician, and watching him operate is sweet.) Dickson wrote a number of other Dorsai stories, both shorts and novels, and never did write the other six books of the Cycle; he died with the project incomplete, by two-thirds. But although there was occasional grumbling from fans, what I heard was mainly of the good-natured ribbing type, rather than the angry, “How dare you go to a convention when the Childe Cycle is still unfinished?!” type.

I think a significant reason for the difference in his fans’ attitudes is that Dickson never gave an actual date when the other books, or the first of the historical trilogy, or whatever, would be complete. He never made a specific promise he didn’t keep.

And since the other branches of the Cycle were set in other eras, none of his enthusiastic Dorsai readers had all that much of an investment in those books anyway. Sure, we would’ve loved to have been able to read them, but it wasn’t as though we were invested in the characters, or were wondering how some specific plot tangle was going to be resolved.

He gave us what we needed; when he died, there weren’t any major plot holes still oozing blood. I would’ve liked to read the other trilogies, but what I did get to read included some really excellent fiction, and I’m satisfied, as are other Dorsai fans. Keeping in mind what sorts of omissions will leave fans mildly disappointed and what sorts will have them setting fire to your in-box is probably a good idea for any writer who intends to write anything that’s not a one-shot.

From the reader’s POV, though, we need to keep in mind that no writer can foresee everything, and that sometimes a project will crash and burn, no matter how hard the author works or how sincere she was when she made a promise. It’s only reasonable for readers to be prudent with their time and money, as well as their emotional investments in fictional worlds and characters; I haven’t read the series mentioned at the beginning of this column, and at this point I don’t plan to start it until it’s finished and I know for a fact that I’ll be able to read the whole thing. Being careful makes sense, especially with a writer who’s had deadline problems already, and I don’t think any writer who’s had such problems can reasonably complain if a reader chooses to sit tight until a storyline is complete.

No matter how understandable anger might be, though, in the case of a long-delayed series, I think the readers need to keep in mind that 1) the writer certainly didn’t plan for this to happen, 2) insurmountable problems do occasionally crop up, and 3) the writer probably feels awful about the delay already and raining abuse down on his head isn’t going to help matters any. Be cautious, sure. Abusive? That’s not going to help.

Another consideration is that writers need regular down-time. Flaming a writer who’s missed a deadline for taking a vacation or mentioning a hobby is missing the bigger picture. Isaac Asimov might’ve been able to write (and produce good work) eight hours a day, seven days a week, for decades on end, but darned few other writers have been able to match his productivity. I certainly don’t come anywhere near it, nor do I personally know any other writers who do. If a writer is having blockage issues, locking him into a single room until the book is finished is likely to be counterproductive, whereas encouraging him to get out, have some fun, do something interesting, get a change of scenery and meet some new people — you know, all the things which help fill the creativity tank? — will probably help. Or at the very least, it won’t hurt.

Starting a series, especially one with a coherent story-arc encompassing some number of books, is a significant commitment on the part of an author. I think authors need to recognize it as a commitment, and be aware that it does carry with it an obligation to finish. Finishing might, in some rare cases, prove to be impossible, but if that does happen then the fans are not being entitled or selfish or immature if they express their disappointment or even anger over that broken obligation. A reasonably sincere sounding apology would probably be in order.

For the readers, though, I think there’s always a reciprocal obligation of basic civility. Particularly if the writer is good enough to offer explanations (though none are really owed) or an apology (which shows class), it doesn’t cost the readers anything to be courteous in their expressions of disappointment.

I’m willing to assume that people are generally acting in good faith. A writer who says the book will be done by April probably meant it when she said it, even if it didn’t work out that way. If a writer says she’s still working on the story, I’m willing to believe her, even if she blogs about taking a week off for a cruise. Who knows — she might get just the spark of inspiration she needs somewhere in the rainforests of Costa Rica. If writers who tackle multi-book projects are aware of the obligation they’re taking on, and do their best to fulfill that obligation, and readers keep in mind that writers are human and sometimes with the best of intentions still fail to do what they really wanted to do, and give them the benefit of the doubt even if they as readers decide to be more careful with their money and time in the future then, well, I think we’ll all be doing the best we can. Which is the best anyone can reasonably expect.

Angie

The other day I bought a book by one of my Short List writers — people whose fiction I buy on sight. A writer makes my Short List because I’ve always loved everything she or he has written, and I’ve come to trust that I probably always will. I’ll buy a Short List writer’s book even if it has a setting or theme or subgenre I don’t usually enjoy; I’ll give it a shot out of trust for that particular writer.

So I started reading this book, which was the latest in a long series which I’ve been enjoying up to now, and it suddenly hit me that I didn’t care for it at all. And looking back, I realized that the same flaws which were annoying me so much in the book in my hands were also present in the earlier books.

It’s as though I’d spent all this time believing I was in love with this writer, only to suddenly snap out of it and realize it’d been infatuation all along. For the several years since my mom loaned me the first however many in the series, I’d been focusing on the good parts and how much fun I was having, and my bubbly, “Oh wow this is so cool!” feelings blinded me to the pretty major flaws the series has, or at least blunted the effects of those flaws so much that the coolness won.

Now, though, it’s like I’m looking at it clearly for the first time. The stories are all alike — she’s been telling the same tale over and over and over, with essentially the same characters. If you reduced each book to a half-page outline and replaced the character names with Bob and Mary, they’d be pretty much identical. The guys are major jerks, agressive and jealous and overbearing and smug about it. The girls all start out telling themselves how strong and independent they are, and their “character development” throughout the story always has them ending up with the “realization” that the right thing to do is surrender completely to these men who love them so much, stop their “selfish” struggle against someone who only wants them to be happy, and settle into their fluttery, admiring little mate role, The End. And of course, as the series goes on, each guy has to be bigger and badder and tougher and more dangerous than all the previous guys, so we’re at the point now (and actually have been for like ten books) where the whole Uber-Hero thing is just ludicrous.

The point isn’t the specifics, though, or whether or not this particular series is or isn’t enjoyable. The point I’m making is that I’ve had boyfriends like this.

You know, the kind of relationship where you’re swept up into the wonderful love and romance of it, all gleefully bouncy and OMGInLove!!! for however long, and then suddenly you wake up one morning and all the euphoria is gone and you’re looking at the guy and wondering what the heck you were thinking. You feel a crushing shame that your friends and family actually know that you thought you were in love with this jerk or idiot or whatever, and now that you’ve come to your senses, you’re sure they’re never going to let you live it down. That’s classic infatuation. Up until now, I thought it only happened with romantic relationships.

Sometimes a writer decides to try something different (which is certainly their right) and you just don’t like the new thing they’re into, so you move on. I imagine it works out, and they get new fans who are into the new thing as much as they lose old fans who aren’t. But that’s a different sort of situation.

In my case a couple of days ago, it wasn’t that the writer and I were slowly growing apart because she was heading into new territory I didn’t care to explore. This was a sudden falling out of love, almost exactly like falling out of love. I’m just as annoyed with myself, and just as embarassed that there are a few people around who know I used to love this writer and this series. And I feel like eating a lot of chocolate or something.

(Do you have any idea how much chocolate I could’ve bought with the money I’ve spent on these books?!)

Has this happened to anyone else? Or am I the only one who’s experienced a long infatuation with a writer’s work, and then a sudden and embarassing falling out of love?

Angie

Every industry has its awards and publishing is no exception. In fact, in publishing every genre has its own awards, and sometimes several sets. Science fiction and fantasy has the Hugos, Nebulas and the World Fantasy Award. Westerns have the Spur Award and mysteries have the Edgars. In Romance, there’s the Rita and the Golden Heart, of course, but almost half of the thirty categories in the EPPIE awards, for electronic publishing, are dedicated to romance or erotic romance. On the GLBT side there are the Lambda Literary awards and the Gaylactic Spectrum awards, both of which are open to romance and erotica.

It’s exciting to be involved in an award cycle, whether you’re nominating and voting, or whether you’re a writer who has something in the running, or whether a friend or even just a favorite author has a story up for an award. My husband and I attend the Hugo ceremony whenever we’re at the World Science Fiction Convention, and it’s always fun just to be there, even if my favorites don’t win.

But when it’s all over and the statues have been presented and the parents thanked and the results published, how much difference do the awards make to the writers who win them? Sometimes books are marked as award winners for marketing purposes. Do you look for award winners when you’re shopping for books? Do awards influence your purchases? Or make it more likely you’ll pick a book up and read the blurb? Or do they influence you not at all? Does it make a difference which award was won?

Ideally, readers should always “win” when fiction awards are handed out. Lists of winners and even finalists should be handy guides for readers interested in finding great books and new authors. Is that actually the case, though? When all the excitement has died down and the statue is just one more thing collecting dust in the author’s office, do the awards make any difference to you as a reader?

Angie

On Friday and Monday, Jordan and Kassia talked about what it might or might not be wise for professional writers to blog about, and why, and some of the potential pitfalls. That got me thinking about a possible way of dealing with the multiple goals of blogging — marketing your books, making friends, talking about your interests, finding other people with similar interests — without making readers choose between seeing posts which might turn them off and ignoring you all together. When I was first published, I had two Angela Benedetti blogs, each for a different purpose. I’ve been thinking about that recently, and the discussions over the last few days have given me even more to consider.

A lot of us already have multiple blogs (journals, newsgroups, web sites, forums, newsletters) and there’s usually at least some differentiation of what sort of material goes into each. I have a journal and two blogs devoted to my writer persona myself, plus a number of other more personal journals. It’s not really a matter of hiding — anyone who Googles “Angela Benedetti” will find almost everything without too much effort — but rather of separating topics and areas of interest so that readers can choose which they want to follow.

My original thinking was that the blog on my web site (and eventually some actual web pages) would be for folks who were interested in my stories and not much else. Someone who just wanted to hear about new releases, read the occasional free story or other “DVD extras” piece, see my reviews, etc., could subscribe to that blog and get only that, without having to wade through my personal opinions on whatever, or my discussions on the process of writing or the industry or anything on that side of the street. My Blogger blog (which is the one linked up in the Columnists list) was my Writer Hat blog, where I could talk about my end of the publishing business, the writing process and craftsmanship, things I was working on and problems and triumphs, and subjects related to what I write about — mainly gay rights and some sex issues — and I anticipated that the main audience there would be other writers, although of course anyone is welcome to read and comment.

I haven’t added content to the web site the way I thought I would, though, and although I still plan to, it’s been pretty dead over there for the last year. (Which is why my writer’s-side blog is the one linked here at RTB.) There might well be 300 people subscribed to the web site blog just for the news bulletin type posts, but they never comment so I don’t know, and I’ve been thinking about what to do with it.

The recent discussions here have made me wonder if it might not help to put different discussions in different boxes — whether blogs or journals or whatever — based on intensity as well as (or even instead of?) actual subject matter. Again, the idea isn’t to try to hide one’s stronger opinions, but rather to let the readers decide which blog(s) they want to subscribe to. Folks who just want release notices and reviews and freebies can subscribe to Blog A, people who want to hear about your garden and your dog and what really wonderful books you’ve read lately can subscribe to Blog B, and people who are up for what you think about politics or what outrageous thing happened at a writing conference or why you dragged yourself kicking and screaming through this other book in the (vain) hope that the writer would somehow manage to pull that mess together by the end, can subscribe to Blog C.

Dividing things up wouldn’t necessarily mean more posts — a reader who subscribed to all three blogs would get the same number of posts as they would if the writer had just posted them all in one blog, and in an automated blog reader it’s all the same. But it’d let folks who really aren’t into the stronger opinions choose not to see them without having to miss the release announcements or contests they want. And it’d let folks who are interested in the writer’s dog and her delphiniums and in what books she thinks people should avoid, but who don’t read the genre she writes and don’t care about a free story set in her fictional universe, get all the “good stuff” without having to scroll past the writing posts.

So what do you think? Is it better all in one box? Or might compartmentalizing be a good compromise? If you’re a writer, what do you do? And if you’re a reader, what do you prefer?

Angie

So, there was a bit of a kerfuffle scattered across a few places last week when Anne Harris reported on her web site and also on the Yahoo list of a gay romance publisher (Torquere Press, which, in the interests of full disclosure, is my publisher) that Ginger Buchanan, editor in chief of Ace and Roc, told her “that m/m can only work in print publishing as erotica, not romance. Her reasoning was that women will read m/m for the sexual thrill of seeing two men together, but when it comes to a story where the goal is a monogamous long-term relationship, they want to be able to place themselves in the story.”

Ummm, yeah. Needless to say, none of the m/m readers or writers involved in the conversations agreed with this, given that in the e-book presses and the hardcopy small presses, m/m romance is alive and thriving and selling quite nicely, thanks much.

So all right, Ms. Buchanan is obviously unfamiliar with the m/m end of the industry and is repeating the common wisdom she’s heard from other important people on the New York end of the romance genre. I’m sure those same people were just as dismissive of the commercial viability of erotic (het) romance before Ellora’s Cave proved that there’s a huge market for it. The larger publishers will figure out how big the readership is for m/m romance eventually, and then they’ll all be scrambling to bring out m/m romance lines. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about, though.

Instead, what I’m curious about is the inherent assumption behind her statement, that all or at least most het romance readers insert themselves into the story, putting themselves in the heroine’s place as they read.

I find it startling that this belief is still alive and kicking today. I remember multiple discussions on the subject twenty years ago (online, although pre-web) among romance writers and readers both, and the conclusion at the time was essentially the opposite.

Early in the history of the genre, it’d been believed that the (100% female, of course) readers imagined themselves in the heroine’s place as they read, and that therefore the writers should do the absolute minimum of characterization of the heroine, so as not to include anything which might interfere with the reader’s ability to imagine that she was the one having these romantic adventures. By the late eighties, the conclusions of a number of discussions on this topic were that 1) a few readers did insert themselves into the heroine’s place as they read, but only a smallish minority, and 2) that the writers had finally rebelled against the “minimal characterization” rule and that it’d been pretty much trashed at that point. (All the readers, the self-inserters and everyone else, strongly agreed that this was an excellent idea, as I recall.)

All right, so obviously the whole minimal characterization thing is still in the trash heap of romance history where it belongs, but at least one major editor is still convinced, here in the twenty-first century, that a pretty significant number of her readers insert themselves into the heroine’s place while they’re reading a romance. She didn’t mention any actual percentages, but clearly if she thought there were any significant number of romance readers who don’t self-insert, she’d see that as a market opportunity for m/m romances. Since she sees no market opportunity at all, I’m concluding that she believes that most or possibly even all het romance readers do self-insert.

I thought this had been settled a generation ago, but since this is a new generation of readers, maybe things have changed again.

So my first question is, do you? When you’re reading a het romance, do you insert yourself into the story? As the heroine? As the hero? As someone else? Or do you just read and imagine what’s going on as though you’re watching a movie? Or something else entirely?

Second, if you do self-insert as the heroine in het romances (or as the hero if you’re a man), and if you do read m/m romances (or f/f romances if you’re a man), how do you handle the fact that the gay romances have no same-gender-as-you character whose place you can take?

Third, if you do self-insert as the heroine in het romances (or as the hero if you’re a man), what’s your reading mode for non-romances? If you’re reading a detective story or an SF story or a fantasy or a Western or lit fiction or whatever else you might enjoy, do you only read books with a protagonist the same gender as you? Or do you simply not self-insert at all in non-romances? Or do you do something else?

I guess what I’m trying to find out here is twofold — first, how many people do self-insert when they’re reading het romances, and second, how many of those people would actually have a problem with m/m or f/f romances because of the lack of a same-gender protagonist? In other words, is it really impossible for a significant number of readers to enjoy fiction which doesn’t have a same-gender protagonist? (And I have to admit that just typing that last question makes my eyes cross, but it’s apparently what the decision-makers in the mainstream publishing houses believe, so it has to be asked.)

It seems to me that even if some people (or a lot of people) do enjoy self-inserting with a romance, that can’t be their only reading mode, unless they simply don’t ever read any fiction which doesn’t have same-gender protags, which doesn’t sound right at all.

So how do you do it? What do you read, how do you enjoy it, and does the gender of the protag make any difference?

Angie

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.