It’s a Job, Not a Reward

Well then, that was special. The happy-happy about where I live is that some moron decided to put the cable box right at the entrance to our subdivision. Right at the side of a very busy road. A very busy road that has many, many accidents right at the entrance to our subdivision.

Seeing the pattern here? Yeah. There was an accident this afternoon apparently, so I’ve been without internet for four hours.

Of course, I did all the non-internet stuff early this morning…when I still had internet. And since half of what I needed to do today was ONLINE…it hasn’t been quite as productive a day as I was hoping.

Oh well.

I guess this means (since at the time of writing, I STILL don’t have internet…) that I might as well write a nice long post.

About…hmm. Nothing springs to mind.

Ooo, I know, a rant. Yes, a rant.

See, I’ve seen a lot of questions basically saying ‘how do I get published?’ ‘how do I write a query letter?’ etc etc etc. Those are all good questions, right?

Well, kinda. But the problem is, a lot of the time, it’s pretty obvious that they want the easy answer. Most of these questions are easily answered by a quick Google search.

And you know what? That’s how I found out all my answers. Every time I answer someone’s questions about something related to writing or publishing, I swear they say ‘wow, you know so much!’.

Behold the power of Google. There are literally hundreds of blogs, ‘ask the agent’ and Q&A sites. Agents and publishers have Twitter too, where they talk about the daily problems associated with publishing and give lots and lots of hints and tips. And, to top off the deal, there are writer’s forums, where you can go read, ask and learn.

“But there’s so much! How do I know what’s real?”

This is actually a really valid question. There must be a dozen ‘how to write a query letter’ sites out there…at least. I stumbled all over those for a while before I figured it out. It can be hard sometimes, to figure out what is valid and up-to-date.

That’s where reading the articles on agency sites, and SFWA can be so useful. They tend to keep up pretty well with what you need to send.

Reading the blogs of newly-published authors is useful too. A lot of the time, these people are going to be talking about what it’s like, how they did it, what they have to do. This is not only good, but priceless.

What you don’t want to do is go around asking ‘how do I get published? How do I write a cover letter?’
Every successful author, agent, editor and publisher has gone through years of research, experience, study and confusion. Do you really expect to bypass all that? That’s what classes and seminars are for. Agent and writers get paid to do those. It’s part of how they make money. Shelling out advice for free is nice and some people will do it, but they get dozens of those questions every day, and the best you’ll probably get is a ‘go research’.

If you do get that answer, don’t get pissed. That’s virtual suicide. The publishing world is a small, tightly-knit one. Everyone has lunch with everyone else. So if you do go off about how unhelpful someone is, chances are, you won’t be all that welcome any more. It’s not rudeness. It’s you have your job, they have their job.

And that’s really what it boils down to. You have your job. Consider the research to be schoolwork. Read, study, do your homework. Writing is a job. No one’s going to do it for you.

So next time you have a question, Google it. There’s a lot of stuff out there to find.

Tomorrow I’ll post some of those resources. After all, it is always nice to get a bit of a headstart from someone!

*edit* Apparently, it’s just me that got lucky. No internet at all, and something seems to be broken. So I’m offline until at least tomorrow night. Gotta love it.

Writing Habits…

…are something I could stand to improve.

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday. In my defense, I honestly thought it was Saturday. ALL. DAY. LONG. I thought it was Saturday. How sad is that? So it wasn’t a lack of dedication, but a lack…well, a lot of other things. Most notably, a brain. Anyone got a spare sitting around please?

Anyways, just finished another round of editing on On Aralu’s Breast. I am pleased with the story. It went from 1200 words to about 2200. Not bad. It’s also heavily erotic. Which leads to the point of this post.

I’ve written two stories set in Sumerian culture now. New Name was not directly Sumerian. In fact, it was meant to tie into my Shadow and Soul world. But further research for Aralu pointed out that I really did write a Sumerian story there. Kema makes a very convincing Ereshkigal, and Hell there is the dusty Aralu of Sumerian myth. I didn’t do that intentionally, I swear.

And it didn’t start out to be sexual. It ended up so. Not blatantly, although a rewrite would change THAT significantly.

The last lines of the two stories were also originally very, very similar. And on thinking back, I’m beginning to notice some common things in my writing.

1.) A sort of passive ‘possession’ that allows the protagonist to see through someone else’s eyes. In Inherent, it just got tweaked so that the narrator saw the entire series of events through the eyes of everyone there. In Aralu, Ku-Inanna is watching through the eyes of a nameless god.

2.) Killing off an old god for a new one to rise. Substitute ‘dragon’ for god, and there’s the story about Prometheus right there.

3.) Changing names. In Inherent, two of the main characters take new names after coronation, and their personality actually shifts to reflect the new things. In Aralu, Ku-Inanna’s name changes to reflect his new situation. Names are power.

4.) A certain ‘breed’ of witch. Namely, one who works just this side of insanity, is very dark, and has the attitude of a goddess. I like my witches.

5.) Dragons. Three different forms at this point. There’s the dragon in Hidden Fire, which is the most ‘traditional’ of the three. Prometheus is a sort of magic/tech hybrid, and Inherent’s dragons are the most odd of the three.

There are more themes, like immortality, vengeance and being consumed by power, but those above are the ones that crop up the most frequently. So, there you have it. I have habits.

Light and Night

Dark. Left-hand path. Descent into Hell. Root of all evil.

Evil is dark, walks to the left, below everything.

Light. Right-hand path. Ascending to Heaven. Pinnacle of good.

Good is bright, walks to the right, and is above all.

This is in mythology, religion, fiction, every day usage.

A friend and I used to spend hours debating the usage of light and dark as concepts of good and evil. We never did come to an agreement.

What is light without dark to give it depth and beauty?

The left hand path is seldom chosen, but there is no path inherently evil.

Without the depths, there is nowhere for roots to take hold, no ground for our feet.

There are two sorts of dark. There is the dark when a bag is slipped over your head, a suffocating, blinding darkness. That is the evil, the darkness that doesn’t want to see what is around it. Selfish and willfully blind.

There is the darkness of night, rest. The darkness that is not evil, but gentle and protective of secrets. It’s the stars, the wind, the lovers and the dreams.

Next time there’s a discussion of light and dark, good and evil, consider them not as flat conceptions, but living and multi-dimensional elementals. It leads to such amazing discussions, and makes magic that much richer.

Frustration, Confidence, Perseverance

There’s a lot of talk about how frustrating it is to find an agent. To get published. To be successful. I believed every word of it before I started.

I didn’t understand the reality of it.

I’ve stated before that I intend to be a successfully published author, regardless of how long/how much work/how much frustration it takes on my part. That’s a fairly recent investment. As in, little over a year old. I’ve contemplated the thought of publication for four years, but two years was learning to write. Those were the early days of Shadow and Soul, when I was still writing mostly for the fun of it. I had no training, no guidance, nothing except sheer desire and raw instinct. At that time, I wasn’t involved with the forum.

While Red Sun was a serious project, it was a serious project by someone who still wasn’t fully committed. If I didn’t feel like writing, I didn’t. There’s a reason the rough draft took almost 2 years to complete, and still looked like crap!

It wasn’t until I wrote New Name that I really dug in. New Name was a project I loved and believed strongly in. Writing it took my breath away. That was the first time I felt I was writing someone else’s words. The difference in passion was unbelievable.

Inherent followed suite. Editing the coronation scene yesterday brought tears to my eyes. Again, it was like reading someone else’s work. I honestly don’t know where I pulled that from, because I don’t feel I’m that skilled!

Hidden and Wind-Loved were sort of the crown jewels of a year of hard work. All the sudden, I have works I’m proud to point to. I don’t need to defend them, they stand on their own.

But now that whole ‘hard work’ thing takes an entirely different track. I’m used to getting up two hours earlier than I used to. I’m used to staying up late, not going out as often, not fooling around online as much, sticking to a schedule that can sometimes be the last thing I want to do. I’m used to getting funny looks when I say I have to go home to work.

I’m used to spending time formatting, submitting, reading, researching. That all is fine with me, it’s stuff I kind of like doing.

I’m not used to marketing myself. Raised in an environment where pride, self-confidence and self-promotion were frowned on, talking about myself positively is hard. Talking about something I’ve done is even harder.

I’m not used to looking at something and honestly believing that it really is that good. I went from really not believing that I’ve got anything special to looking at some of my stuff and going “damn, that deserves to make it out there”.

I’m not used to sticking by a project that keeps getting turned down. My mindset is that if it got turned down, there’s something wrong with it. Well, no. It just hasn’t found the right place.

I’m not great at faith, is the bottom line, and especially not faith in myself. That’s going to have to change.

The problem with all these big lessons to be learned is that I don’t adapt to change half as well as I wish I did. I dig in my heels and respond negatively to almost any change. That’s my single biggest obstacle to overcome.

I have a flash-point fuse. I opened Hidden this morning to discover that the hour of formatting I’d put in there had been all jacked. BADLY jacked. And I’d sent it to, of all places Clarkesworld like that. A mature reaction would be an ‘oops, crap, must go fix and figure out what went wrong’. My reaction was purely emotional. Stupidly, unprofessionally emotional. Shit happens. Get over it.

Now, after the initial temper tantrum, I’m cool and will make it work. But that frustration is too easily triggered, and I’d better not make it to anything before I get that under control or I’ll sabotage myself. If indeed I can actually make it with an attitude like that. Project A: Change the damn attitude.

I have the skill. I worked hard for that skill. Now I have to have the savvy, the ability to promote myself, put myself out there. Like getting a first job, getting a first publishing credit is bloody hard. The cover letters look pathetic. Non-fic, I’m good, I’ve got experience there. Editing is fine too, I’ve been the editor for several people now. Fic, not so hot.

Baby steps. We’re going with baby-steps here.

Confidence is hard to get, and harder to keep.

Frustration is easy to come by, and hard to banish.

Perseverance is the hardest of all. Talent isn’t worth a damn thing without humility, perseverance, maturity and tact.

Remind me of that next time the manuscripts play Twister on me please? It will do me a world of good.

Nowhere to Submit?

Looking for a magazine to submit my short stories to has been a little frustrating, a little depressing too. So many of them say ‘Closed’, ‘not open till August of 2300AA (After Apocalypse, thank you very much)’. While I have a submission list, I have maybe five magazines to submit to.

That irritated me. And then today, I started thinking about it and came to a somewhat startling realization.

I’d love to have subscriptions to all of these magazines so that I can see the awesome work that I’m trying to match. I’d like to have them just because I love short stories. The problem? I don’t have anywhere near enough money to subscribe to F&SF, Ideomancer, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Cemetery Dance, and however many other great magazines are out there. There are too many options.

Effectively, it’s a bunch of publications trying to fill the same niche at the same time. Which is awesome. Market diversity is a great thing. But when magazines and anthologies are the only short-story market, it will get glutted in a hurry.

A lot of magazines have closed recently, and with the economy being what it is, plenty of others seem to be tightening their belts along with the rest of us. I don’t think the answer is to start more magazines. We’ve already seen that the market can’t support that many. Like it or not, a lot of places are moving online.

Personally, I love print. I like print books, print newspapers, print magazines. There’s something so satisfying about holding a book, turning the pages. I can’t read an entire book in one sitting at my computer. I tried that with Anne Bishop’s Dark Jewels series. I can read a book in one sitting, if it’s in my comfy chair with a soft lamp and a cup of tea. I can’t tell you how many hours have slipped away in that manner. I love sitting at the breakfast table in the morning, reading a magazine while sipping tea or OJ. It’s a bit of escapism, because I spend so much time at my computer.

Also, if I have something in print I own it. Even an ebook can be lost in those all too-frequent computer crashes.

I’ve mentioned before that short stories don’t really get much love, and certainly not as much respect as a novel. But some of our most enduring literary works are little more than short stories, or compilations of short stories.

As a kid, we spent hours in the evening, reading out loud. It wasn’t that we didn’t have anything to do, or that we weren’t tired. My grandfather still puts in 10-12 hour days at his engineering office, my grandmother runs the property and takes care of the animals and does all of the taxes and bookwork and errands. When I was young, we were involved heavily in church as well. I was home-schooled for a long time. We watched plenty of movies (but no TV).

We would read a book a week at least… out loud. Short stories, novels, religious reading. It is one of the best memories of my life. It taught me inflection, pronunciation, appreciation. It helped me overcome a mild speech impediment (although that has reappeared to some degree… possibly because I don’t read aloud anymore!)

Short stories are perfect to read aloud at family night.

Short stories are something even busy people can commit to. Teenagers won’t get bored as quickly… And do you really want them reading something that’s the quality of Twilight or Eragon when there are such wonderful options available?

Short stories are great for giving yourself an introduction to a particular author’s work. There are many authors I’d never have picked up except for reading one of their short stories.

In short, let’s have more anthologies. Let’s give short stories some love, and let’s not forget that we really do have a nice selection of magazines to send our short stories to, it is in fact an embarrassment of riches.

2nd Time Tribulations

The first writing project is a combination of guts, glory and desire. A first-time writer doesn’t have a clue how they are supposed to do all this and keep it all straight, but by george they are going to make it work!

On of the ways to make that work is to read read read. But with reading comes knowledge. And knowledge is a frustrating little bugger. Because knowledge makes a writer realize that I wasn’t doing it right!.

Cue the second project. Now, it must be done RIGHT. LAWS must be followed. The RULES OF WRITING ™ must be obeyed. There are sekrits about this writing thing, don’tcha know? And if you do them all right, well then, you’ll be HEAP BIG AUTHOR.

Yeah. That gets frustrating in a hurry. Trust me. I’ve been there. My first project was the ancestor of Shadow and Soul, but it was based on years of casual, hobbyist writing with definate overtones of fanfic. But I wasn’t doing it to be HEAP BIG AUTHOR, I was doing it because it was fun. 50,000 words of literary tangle later, I shelved it, and started a new project.

This time, I was going to follow the RULES OF WRITING to the letter. I researched, I plotted, I outlined, I followed word-counts, I did everything right. And Red Sun kicked the hell out of my enthusiasm and love of the written word.

My mother will tell you that I hated that book by the time I was ‘through’. It had gone through so many dramatic changes and convolutions that I had my million words of shit right there in the history of one book. But I was doing it RIGHT, and so I would be HEAP BIG AUTHOR, yes?

No. Red Sun is a premise of gold that was alchemically reduced to a steaming pile of crap. I didn’t like my own writing. Someone less bloody-minded (and possibly far wiser) than I would have chucked the book the way of the original fantasy project. I didn’t. I actually submitted the damn thing to about ten agents before I came to my senses. Red Sun now waits to be rewritten. From scratch. Because it is a golden concept that was mangled by doing it RIGHT.

Third time’s the charm. I wrote the 11,000 word New Name in a month. Within 3 months, it was edited and ready to be read. I loved it from beginning to end, I will ALWAYS see that story as the real ‘lightbulb’ moment of “Oh my god. I love this thing called writing.” Unfortunately, its length leaves few avenues of publication, so it has sat idle for a while.

Inherent has mostly gone the way of New Name. Fast, challenging, enjoyable, beautiful. I even love editing it. I can toot my own horn over this story, I can sell it. Or, I’ll be able to sell it once I boil the premise down to a few pithy sentences. It’s had its trials, and it certainly needs more editing. But it is night and day compared to Red Sun or the early Shadow and Soul.

I’ve seen this ’second-time blues’ in other places too, in other forms. It seems to be more pronounced when the first project goes unexpectedly well.

New Name was something I wrote from a fragment of a dream. I didn’t expect anything out of it, I’d never written a complete short story. It was so good, that I felt capable of setting the market alight with my short stories.

I haven’t completed a decent one yet, in 6 months. Nothing can compare to New Name. I’ve started, set aside, and moved on. Finally, I’ve sat down and made myself write a new story in the spirit of New Name. Instead of using any inspiration, old story or anything else, I wrote a line about the wind and have written a new myth. And I’m actually relatively pleased with it.

The most striking example I’ve seen of this concept is in my friend and writing buddy Kuro (Kelly Stiles). After submitting a piece to Fantasy Magazine, almost on a whim, Fantasy published her micro-fiction Night Comes Softly. It was an amazing success, her first publication, and against some very good competition too.

But how do you follow up such a success? She and I have been wrangling with edits on her next piece, Calling Down the Rain for a few weeks now. It’s got a ton of promise. But somehow, it keeps bumping up against the shadow of Night Comes Softly and getting scared. We compared it to the first story, when it is really its own thing and shouldn’t be lumped with that old one. The old one was a success however, and so now its a standard, a measuring stick.

It’s hard to follow success without wondering ‘will this be as good?’ ‘Was that a one-time thing?’ It starts getting too thought-out, and not as natural. And then no, it doesn’t work like a heart-felt piece does, at least not without a hell of a lot of love and nurturing.

The key to truly powerful writing is to write the unexpected, the heart-felt, the story that won’t be diagrammed and outlined like all the others. It can’t be done RIGHT. It has its own mind, its own ideas. Plot, outline, research away, but if the story doesn’t agree with you, listen to it.

I deleted 50,000 words of the old Shadow and Soul and started a new world, of which Inherent is part. And now I listen to the story, and I love it more than I ever hated it.

Leave the successes and failures behind you when you write. They have no place in anything but themselves.

On Character Relationships-Dragons and Treasures

Writing character-driven fantasy is challenging enough when human characters are being used. So, since ‘challenging-enough’ apparently equals ‘boring!’ in my life, I had to go and use dragons, immortals, witches and various beasties. The upside of that is some pretty cool characters. The downside of that is that my mind has stretched in directions I didn’t know could be stretched.

The relationships between the characters are relatively simple, at first glance. We’ll use Erotherimas and Rivareyt as an example. Erotherimas has been married several times, Rivareyt is his fourth wife. All the others died of old age or natural causes. Seeing as Erotherimas is immortal, this has caused some significant angst on his part, since he also has had to watch his children die. Of the three dragons in the story, he’s become the most human. He wants to be mortal, to die and move on. But he can’t. Immortals only die by someone else’s hand.

Erotherimas marries Rivareyt for cynical reasons. In the past, he married women that he liked, and loved. He did not meet Rivareyt until the wedding. He married her because she might improve his standings with Kortango’s expanding empire, and because he didn’t think he could possibly love a stranger.

Rivareyt has some pretty dark secrets of her own–and as I write this, I realize they are darker than I wrote, and will need to be colored a little–and she doesn’t know the meaning of love. Literally. She’s a shy, scared little woman with serious emotional issues and scars.

Erotherimas is a force of nature–also literally, as the dragon of Earth–and Rivareyt is the soft, submissive girl whose strength is so deeply buried that it takes the blunt force of Erotherimas to bring it out. And when he finally does, things get complicated.

There is an old concept in Shadow and Soul that I originally used to describe the relationship between Aleshan and Kasiris, before I even had the concept of Inherent: Glamargan and Valemos. The Glamargan is the treasure of a dragon… In living flesh. It is his (or her) mate or closest companion. Valemos is the possessor of that treasure, the dragon itself. As the dragons of Shadow and Soul are more of spiritual than physical nature, even the thinnest strains of dragon blood can develop this attachment.

A Valemos is absolutely centered around its Glamargan. Obsessive, controlling, protective, furious without the object of its love. Of course, most people would simply disappear into such overwhelming possession. But a Glamargan brings out the deepest levels of such concepts precisely because they do not disappear into the obsession. They are incredibly stubborn, difficult and independent. Put simply, they are the worst nightmare, headache, life-long love, treasure and goddess (or god) of the Valemos. Because of the exceptional power of the dragons, the Glamargan has to be strong enough to be a grounding point.

The downside for a Valemos–and where the concept gets tricky–is that the Glamargan pretty much has absolute power over them. The dragon will do anything for its treasure. Erotherimas starts a war because Rivareyt says he should. Aleshan, thwarted in his obsession, douses a continent in blood and eventually faces his worst fears, because Kasiris won’t come near him until he is in possession of himself.

Karamarog and Sviera have the same relationship, while Mortathes loses a great deal of potential power but lives longer because he refuses to give anyone that power over him. The old dragons are a dying breed because so many of them lost their treasures in the wars.

Such a relationship is very, very difficult to conceptualize. It is, in human terms, an unhealthy relationship. In immortal terms, all relationships border on that. But even by immortal standards, the Valemos is dangerous and undesirable. Karamarog kidnaps and ‘trains’ Sviera to be the witch he sees her to be, basically overriding her free-will for a while and holding her captive. Kasiris, the flip-side (although of dragon-blood herself) tears Aleshan’s soul to pieces in revenge for his attempted claiming of her.

Putting myself in that headspace is draining, emotional and disturbing. But obsession is one of the most powerful emotions, and gives the most powerful characters of my stories a weakness as vast as their power. When Sviera is broken, so is Karamarog. When Kasiris breaks from Aleshan, they both nearly die.

But in the end, it enables them to change the course of history… for the entire universe.

Tattoos

Tattoos in ‘modern’ culture have long been a sign of gang-related activity, criminals, or the underground sub-cultures in general. Although they are now mainstream, the type and placement of the tattoo still greatly affects its ‘acceptability’. Face, neck and hands are usually either hard-core enthusiasts, shock-value or gang. One or two tattoos might be acceptable where an entire body clothed with tattoos is not.

One of the tattoo types that is gaining in popularity is the horimono, the Japanese tattoos. Originally a cultural symbol, tattooing was outlawed in the late 1800s in an attempt to gain respect in Western eyes. At that time it became associated with outlaws and specifically the yakuza, Japan’s ‘mafia’.

In ancient cultures, tattoos told as many stories as the wise story-tellers. From marks of bravery and glory to marks meant to convey protection and luck, tattoos were rites of passage and telling symbols of a person’s status.

I’ve been fortunate to find a tattoo shop that still has a focus on individualistic art work and in making statement pieces. Ace Custom Tattoo has skilled artists, but it’s as much fun to listen to people talk, or to watch them interact with the artists. Simply lying under the needles is indeed an experience that changes a person. It’s permanent, more than anything else. Piercings will grow in. Children will leave the nest, marriages dissolve and plans change. A tattoo either has to be removed–a process that costs an incredible amount of pain and money–or covered up, or they last forever. It is truly a sort of passage, and I can only imagine how it would be with traditional methods!

In Inherent, tattooing is a sign of power. Personal, physical, spiritual, the more tattoos, the more power. Women, as the channels of power in the post-Marasran society, are the most heavily tattooed. Mothers have distinctive patterns, wives, healers all have their own patterns. Shamans and witches have patterns outlawed to the rest of the society.

Totem animals are proudly displayed, spirit guides are more often marked by a simple symbol in a discreet place. For characters such as Sviera, Txikia, Maurga and the other powerful priestesses and witches, tattoos are far more. Txikia, daughter of the Imordi, would have been tattooed young, receiving her first mark when her power began to manifest. From then on, the tattoos would grow and spread through the years (although due to her association with one of the Princes, her tattoos would have been covered and altered, thereby erasing much of her early history), until by the time of Inherent, she would be almost entirely covered.

Sviera, Queen of the Night and Lady of Chaos, would be the most elaborately tattooed of any of them, especially as her mate is Karamarog, an Imordi dragon. Her designs start at eyes and hands, swirling lines and pictures stretching the length of her body, telling the story of her power and achievements.

Women, in the world of Inherent, are considered nearly a different species from the men. In that age, the goddesses were still supreme, and their consorts were the heroes. Men achieved maturity, married and had children, and might achieve great deeds, but their inner journeys–the ones recorded through tattoos–were seldom as memorable. Women were respected and held in high honor. A heavily-tattooed woman could walk into any eastern city at that time and be welcomed and honored as a mouthpiece of the goddesses. However, western cultures in Kortango and the metropolises of Virgal-Goien were beginning to shift to a patriarchal religion, and the first witch-burnings were seen around the time of Sviera’s power.

Names have power. Tattoos were often names in physical form, and can tell a powerful story without a single word spoken.

What position in your fictional society do tattoos hold? Power, disgrace, honor? How are they done, and what are the traditional designs? I’d love to hear!

On Character

I’m sure every reader is used to this scenario. Pick up a book off a book-store shelf. The blurb is great. The cover art is wonderful. The first chapter reads like a publisher’s wet dream. So, reader buys book. Book goes home, reader starts to get to know book.

Reader, at chapter five, detests character. Reader takes book back.

Plot, style, all of these things are certainly necessary. But I have put so many books back, and sold so many more to used bookstores, just because the characters flat-out sucked. Books by very popular authors in fact, have been returned.

I’m not the world’s hardest sell. I liked ‘Hancock’ tremendously, and endured sarcasm for weeks over that. But ‘Hancock’ was a good character! The characters of Hayden’s ‘Rhapsody’ books are good characters. The quirky, weird people of Jonathan Carroll’s book are amazing characters. These are some of my favorite books, simply because of the characters. I love the world, I love the writing, but I would have put ‘Rhapsody’ down if Ashe hadn’t grabbed me by the throat.

I received a comment on Abadinur from one of my test readers, calling Amarog ‘a great literary character’. It surprised me really. I thought Amarog was good, but not spectacular. My spectacular characters were supposed to be the witches. Instead, here’s big, super-power Amarog who doesn’t have much of a journey in the book, and he’s the literary character? Oh. Obviously I need to ponder this a little.

One of the cardinal rules of writing is to observe the people around you. People-watch, people-listen, people-write. I sit at coffee shops, I eavesdrop at restaurants. And I’ve come to the conclusion that there aren’t that many characters left in the world. There are a lot of people, but not many characters.

Our society has stopped admiring individuality. We give it a lot of lip-service, and maybe there’s no more conformism than there ever was. Maybe it’s just that I work in Soccer-mom/upper-middle-class heaven that I’ve gotten jaded. But I look at my past and there are so many interesting people there! Where have they gone? These are the people I based my characters on.

My crazy uncle, who was a sniper in Vietnam and now believes that contrails are going to end the world. The incredibly devoted Czech preacher and his wife, who corresponded for years before they married, and who remained together until his death of Parkinson’s. The people who randomly started telling me about their lives in the grocery store, or at the gas station while I was locked out of my car. These are just a few of the people I look at.

When I wrote Amarog, and to some extent Aleshan from Shadow and Soul, I looked close to home. My grandfather’s unflagging sense of right and wrong, and his father’s temper and pride. Two friends that I love more than I should, both army vets with scars that don’t show through to the outside, but who’s worst scars aren’t from war, but love. A man who buried both his daughter and his murdered wife, who was barely saved from an act of vengeance, and who took a job working with terminally ill children to learn how to heal and love. 20 year old men who might have been partying and getting laid, but who were instead changing teenager’s diapers and leading them in sing-alongs and learning more about compassion and personal strength than most people learn over a lifetime. Men who are a dying breed. Those are the literary characters, and I just watch them and learn. Those are the men I base my ‘heroes’ on.

People aren’t ‘good’ and they aren’t ‘bad’. A character that is ‘good’ is indeed a character, and while he may live in imagination, he’ll never make it off the page. Same with a villain who is pure evil. There is no such thing in humanity, in my belief.

One of the most stunning villains I’ve read was in Anne Bishop’s Belladonna. The Eater of the World. Pure, total, malevolent evil. It wasn’t a person, it was a force. You despised it. *SPOILER! And then it meets something more evil, more cruel, and it becomes understandable and relatable. I hated that book for making me feel pity for something that was beyond evil. Brooks’ demon from ‘Running With the Demon’ was similarly understandable. With both of them, once I got started, I couldn’t stop.

One of the most heart-wrenching heroes I’ve read was Charles de Lint’s* ‘Jack’. Shiftless, restless, temperamental. He left his daughter, his wife went crazy. His daughter was maybe a little bit crazy too. He was relatable. For me, he was a character I could very much relate to, for my own reasons. But beyond that, he was flawed, maybe a little broken, but he got over that, got his power back and saved the day.

(*For the record, de Lint is one of those authors I would recommend hands-down to anyone. I’ve studied him since I first came in contact with his stories. His female characters are brilliant, he understands the archetypes of Trickster and other folk-tale creatures and uses them to brilliant advantage.)
There are some people who really are good, and bad. Not all good or bad, but mostly. I knew one of the good girls as a child. As sweet and amazing as anyone could be. I’ve been fortunate not to know anyone really ‘bad’, at least close and personally. Weak and contemptible, yes. But unless something changes them inside, those aren’t the characters a reader is going to remember.

A lot of things go into making a ‘real’ character. But a character is one place where I believe reality should triumph over fiction, where the motivation should be drawn from the solid world. Fantastic elements can certainly play a part, and should in fantasy, but the motivations should be simple and relatable.

Real people should inhabit the pages of a story. Not Disney princesses and cartoon villains.

Hair: The New Anti-hero

Warning: Silliness and writing talk may be closer than they appear.

“Does your hair go ‘poof!’ in the rain? ‘Cause, with all that curl…” That’s the question I got this evening when, as I prepared to leave work, I faced the prospect of summery shoes, a parking lot that was rapidly becoming submerged, and, well, rain.

Now, anyone who has met me, knows The Hair.

People who know me, pet The Hair. People who don’t know me pet The Hair, exclaim over its length, poofiness and curl. Hairdressers and brushes cry when they meet The Hair. If someone wrote a story about my life, The Hair would be a major character. Probably a Trickster archetype.

Now, we aren’t just talking run-of-the-mill hair here. This is special hair. This is hair that has literally broken the handle off of a new brush (after it was half untangled!), the hair the everyone I’ve dated has survived being smothered by, the hair that is my most deadly weapon of seduction, the hair that no one will let me cut. Then again, since the last time I cut it, I got special and had a free afro, I’m in no hurry to cut it again. It’s Veronica Lake hair when its happy, supermodel hair in the morning (you know, those crazy updoes that take hours and five cans of hairspray? Yeah, that’s my hair’s natural state), murderous hair when I don’t care for it, and one of the three reasons people love me. It is finicky: 1 type of shampoo, 1 type of conditioner, both from Lush, are the only things it will tolerate, a certain kind of brush, etc. It either looks like a dead cat on my head or a shampoo commercial.

My hair could have a book written about it, its history, and its moods.

What’s the point of this ramble? Well, besides a rant about my hair, it’s pointing a finger at the general concept of heroine hair. Most heroines tend to have Glowing Gold hair, or else Silky Sable. A very few have Fire Red. It’s usually either Straight as a Sword, or else Gently Waving (waving at what, is usually left to the reader’s imagination, thankfully). Either way, it’s wonderful and maintenance free.

Go conduct a poll of 100 women and see how many you find that match such a wonderful description.

In real life, you are more likely to have Glowing-the-Color-Went-Wrong-and-I-Have-Orange-Sticks-On-My-Head hair. Or maybe you do have Silky Sable… But that’s probably after about five hundred dollars a month in hair treatments, a personal hair dresser, five hours a day spent brushing it while reading love sonnets aloud to it, and of course, a gentle conditioner of bitter tears. Or maybe it’s Fire-(Possessed)-Red. You know, the type that one a windy day appears to be eating its person’s face?

You can tell a lot about a person by their hair. Is it stuffed messily into a rubber tie, bits and pieces sticking out every which way? Is it loose, wind-blown and unruly? Is it tacked down by an ungodly amount of what appears to be secret formula Gorilla Glue? Does the person smooth it, play with curls, tuck it behind their ears, run their hands through it (if you run hands through my hair, for instance, you don’t get your hands back, and my hair has a great dinner), or maybe toss it airily out of their face? Are their shapes, colors, styles associated with that person, or do they wear it however, whenever?

I’d be willing to bet that about a hundred characters could easily be created as completely unique, just by hair.

Take time to think about the quirky small things. I’d have a lot more sympathy for the princess if she woke up with her hair trying to tie her feet to her head. A little identification, see?

And no, my hair doesn’t go ‘poof!’ in the rain. It goes this: