alien romances

Welcome to the Future Again (Today)

2012-01-26T09:00:00.000-05:00

We recently bought our first iPad. I wanted a lightweight, portable device for only two purposes, to watch streaming videos on something other than the desktop computer and to read e-mail away from home. My husband needed the iPad for navigational functions and other apps related to flying.

This wondrous gadget stimulated me to think about the technology in J. D. Robb’s Eve Dallas series, set around 2060. One thing I like about these mysteries is that they portray a future I can believe, for the most part, my grandchildren as middle-aged adults will live in.

I have no trouble believing in orbital space station colonies fifty years from now. We still don’t have the flying cars driven by Lt. Dallas’s police department and wealthy civilians (and would you really want them widely available, considering how much havoc some drivers wreak in only two dimensions?). But there’s no reason they couldn’t be built, and “smart cars” that drive themselves are coming soon. Experimental models already exist, whether they will ultimately need special highways (as in Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll”) or operate independently.

Eve’s almost magical handheld forensic gadget (similar to Dr. McCoy’s medical tricorder), which can even instantaneously read a precise time of death for a corpse, seems a little bit out there. However, the “link” that everyone in 2060 carries now looks awfully familiar. It’s essentially an iPad with a lot of futuristic apps and reduced to about the size of a phone. We’re almost there!

In Eve’s time people don’t watch TV. They watch “screen.” All their media access comes through the computer. Already in the present day, some people choose to get news, music, movies, and TV shows on their computers (and Robb’s novels started imagining this development decades ago). As hardware gets cheaper and the Internet more versatile, the routine integration of all forms of media into one outlet can’t be far behind.

One more futuristic invention in the Eve Dallas series, though, still seems fantastic to me: Robot workers (“droids”) that can converse intelligently and, at a glance, can hardly be distinguished from live people. I’m not so sure we’ll achieve those in fifty years.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 3

2012-01-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago I introduced this odd hybrid historical romance trilogy, Rashi's Daughters:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html

Last week ...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical_17.html

... I made a few spoiler comments and showed you one of those bizarre karmic links that pepper my existence -- how Maggie Anton inserted a bit of dialogue in her third novel that had no business in her novel but was just about the most illuminating and important bit of data to randomly pop up before my eyes in decades.

Anton had researched the 1040 C.E. era to a fair-the-well, and given her main character of the third book, Rashi's Daughters: Book III Rachel, a task, a goal, and the ability to learn an entire craft and invent a business model for it. She put Rachel into the textile industry and had her discuss wool cloth manufacture and dye.

Readers of Sime~Gen already see my hair standing on end. Coincidence abounds in this world, but folks, there's a LIMIT you know!

The datum that blew me out of the water was simply a reminder of something I had known for decades but had no memory of ever having learned -- that BLACK wool cloth is very difficult, rare, costly, and that at the beginning of the dye industry, the true black dye was a trade secret for each dyer.

It was knowing that obscure fact about the early cloth dye industry that caused me to assign BLACK as the single most special color in the Sime~Gen novels, Farris Black.

And those few lines of dialogue Anton wrote, which I quoted last week, prompted me to assemble my observations about these novels into this advanced writing lesson, the integration of Research and Plot which creates the foundation for every Paranormal Romance novel.

The "paranormal" has an immense amount of non-fiction literature to research, everything from mythology to ESP research, and all the way into the depths of theology -- down deep enough to get into Kabbalah. You can assemble facts to support almost any kind of worldbuilding you need for your particular Romance.

Anton knew about wool dye what I had known long before building it into the Sime~Gen novel, House of Zeor, associating it with the Farris family, but Anton used her knowledge in a different way than I used mine -- and the result is a set of totally different reader responses. I pointed you to those on amazon last week, and picked out two contrasting ones, one from her first novel and one from mine.

As I've said, it seems to me that the Rashi's Daughters trilogy (he had only three daughters and no sons) should be classed as Paranormal Romance, and with only very slight changes in the stories, would fall right into the model for some of the very best Paranormal Romances.

The Medieval world Anton has built includes all the beliefs and practices of Jewish Astrology, and the demonology extant among the general public. Disease was caused by demons and other supernatural influences, and could be averted or cured by charms, sigils and signs, and chanting.

Anton even sites the first thing anyone starting on the Occult Studies path learns - that the more advanced on that path you get, the more of a target you become for the negative forces that abound in the world (and mostly leave ordinary people alone). Rashi, being extremely advanced spiritually, was such a target as were his family members - simply for being his family members. Once the daughters embarked on spiritual advancement, they too became targets in their own right. That's a principle from Kabbalah. But Rashi, himself, did not study Kabbalah. Anton walked right by the most incendiary plot-elements her hard-fact research turned up.

Anton does have her characters cure or avert evil influences with Kabbalistic practices, but without internal consequences to the characters. The actions don't adhere to what I've termed in my posts on plotting, "the because line." Any one of these incidents could have supported the entire envelope plot for the trilogy, but because she has just inserted these simple facts, the plot events become incidents and vignettes interesting in themselves but without consequence to the story-line. (remember plot and story are different, but must be connected by theme).

To us, today, such ideas as disease caused by demons sound ridiculous. But we have no problem with them when reading Paranormal Romance -- even television series incorporate witches and spells, otherworldly occurrences and magic. For the most part, the worldbuilding behind Paranormal Romance novels is not nearly as coherent, interesting, deep, and plausible as the very real Medieval belief systems Anton only refers to briefly.

Few of the comments on amazon even mention the demonology, or criticize or critique it. It's throwaway techno-babble to most general readers, even historical fiction experts. Yet Anton walked right by a chance to explain that dimension of reality to modern readers, what it could mean in modern terms and what it means to those on a spiritual journey.

Maybe she didn't know how, or maybe she didn't explain it because Rashi, himself, is famous for his entry-level, beginner's explanations of the Torah, Mishna and Gemara. Rashi didn't incorporate any of the far out, mystical, Kabbalistic material in his explanations. Most of the literature on Kabbalah that we use today wasn't written down until a couple hundred years later, but there were scholars who knew and practiced it in Rashi's day.

Anton does mention a Mezuzah scribe who uses some Kabbalistic knowledge, and has her characters use such a Mezuzah to protect and heal sick people and bring them back from death's door. But then the incident just sits there - having no consequence to the inner, subconscious or spiritual life of the Daughters. It's just that the person lives a little longer. That's not plot, that's incident.

How do you tell a plot event from an incident?

A plot event changes the main character's understanding of his/her reality. That is a plot event affects the story-line.

An incident illustrates something the writer wants the reader to know about the main character's understanding of his/her reality, but does not change the character's behavior or the menu of options the character has to choose from.

In a plot-event, the reader walks in the character's moccasins. In an incident, the reader learns that something happened or how it happened, but it doesn't happen to the reader.

Anton constructs her narrative line from the researched facts about the lives of this family, then inserts incidents along that narrative line, giving the strong impression of a plot without having an actual plot.

As I pointed out last week, in the Rashi's Daughter's trilogy, interesting hard-fact details of Medieval life are tossed in on top of Anton's narrative about three women living in Medieval times who possess a modern feminist self-image and attitude -- pure fantasy, a kind of fantasy that works fabulously well with Paranormal Romance writing techniques and fails abysmally with only Historical Novel writing techniques.

The incident-structure causes us to be informed that Rashi's Daughters had a modern feminist attitude -- but not how they acquired it, what their attitude did to them, and what they did to our world because of their attitude. Because of the incident-structure, readers who don't already have a feminist attitude don't come to walk-a-mile as a feminist. Readers who do have a feminist attitude may feel nice about having their attitude validated, but will not come away from these novels with a usable impression of life in Rashi's home.

If the trilogy had a genuine trilogy plot-structure, all readers would come away from the trilogy with a good, emotional, non-verbal grasp of how Rashi's household lifestyle created feminist attitudes in all the women associated with it, and caused them to blossom into full realized, highly spiritual women.

One of the researched hard-facts that Anton must have come across studying Mishna is that Jewish culture understands women to be on a higher spiritual level than men, just inherently more spiritually advanced (the opposite of Christianity), which is why men are commanded to listen to their wives. Women carry a tremendously weighty responsibility because of that position of being closer to G-d (which is why women pray in a whisper when men shout out prayers -- because it's rude to shout right into G-d's ear) -- and therein lies the material for Anton's overall trilogy plot. But she walked right by that opportunity as if she had no clue how to worldbuild to springboard a plot.

Remember, we're talking about crafting Paranormal Romance here - not about the realities of Medieval Judaism. You can replace the "Medieval Judaism" elements in Anton's trilogy with any fantasy world you are building to support your story. If Anton had used world she built herself here, I'd be making the exact same comments about the incident-structure vs the plot-structure method of storytelling.

Anton's view of Medieval Judaism "works" in these romance books just the way any fantasy world would work.

With application of the techniques for integrating research into plot, Anton could have "sold" her fantasy to her readers and made them suspend disbelief long enough to finish the trilogy and go off with a furious hunger for finding out the reality behind the Talmud.

Her fantasy Talmud would only whet the appetite. As it is, few of the commentators on Amazon are talking about the Talmud itself or their experience of it in real life.

Using the string of incidents structure, Anton manages to inform us that Rashi's Daughters loved Talmud as much as Rashi did -- but does not make us love Talmud the same way.

The reader commentaries on Amazon about the trilogy show either a sense of outrage at Anton's "inaccuracies," a delight at the upstanding female characters and their stories, or the commentaries get all wound up in the Medieval background.

Many readers found the second or third books disappointing because they didn't deliver on the expectations aroused by the first book. Each reader is seeing only one level of this work because the "research" facts lay on top of the character-story like oil on water.

"Shaken, not stirred" comes to mind. There are writing techniques for creating a smooth blend of antagonistic elements -- like Talmud and sexuality, or sexuality and willful independence.

Now keep in mind that I feel Anton intended to do with this series what other Romance authors have done with Historical Romance: graft a feminist attitude onto female characters who lived in an oppressive world, were raised to be subservient and obedient, self-effacing, and never show their intelligence to a male. That's alternate-history fantasy, and it's great fun to read, but can be misleading if the reader doesn't know it's a game the writer is playing, not an actual window into the past.

The way Anton's trilogy is written, I can't tell if she knew she was playing the alternate-history-paranormal-romance game with her readers. The tantalizing thing about this trilogy is that Anton almost got it right, whether she knew what she was doing or not.

Some people need to know what they're doing in order to do it "right" (so they get the results they aim at) -- and some people really need to NOT KNOW what they're doing, how they do it, or possibly even that they're doing it, in order to do it "right."

That applies to how to write books, historical fiction novels, and most especially historical fiction romance novels.

Knowledge is one level of cognition, but there are many others (intuition, emotion, assumptions) that all operate at the same time.

Each level of cognition can show up on special brain scans as "circuits" or whole areas of the brain energized or activated -- sometimes in one location of the brain, sometimes connecting several locations. There are a number of studies ongoing now about how our brain functions, mostly with the focus on how to repair damage or correct birth defects. These studies also have an application to the writing craft, to the understanding of how we respond to entertainment, how and why entertainment is a necessity not a luxury.

We can emphasize one level of brain activity over another, but we can't shut off the other levels completely. Consider all the studies you've read about brain damage and how loss of a part of the brain can affect personality, perception and judgement. We use all of our brains all the time on everything we do -- we just shift the emphasis.

That's why when we read books and novels, we want the input we're absorbing to trigger brain activity on all our levels -- but emphasize one level above the others, then orchestrate a changing emphasis in a pleasing way from one scene to another, one chapter to another, just as we experience in real life.

Note that word "orchestrate" -- reading a novel is like listening to a symphony. Every word triggers associations (semantic loading) that light up pathways in the brain. Every sentence, image, scene, emotional-engagement among characters, is a "voice" of an instrument in the symphony. The writer is the conductor, bringing one section of the orchestra then another up to the fore (making them louder or softer with a gesture). The audience feels their pleasure is from the players of the individual instruments (liking one character over another) -- but the actual source of pleasure is the conductor's skills.

The conductor's job is to gently, smoothly shift the way the pathways of the listeners' brains light up, producing pleasure.

No orchestra is any better than its least skilled player. But any orchestra can fail abysmally even with world-class players in every seat if the players aren't all playing the same score, or if the conductor puts each section of the orchestra in a separate soundproof booth so they can't hear each other or see the conductor.

That's what I think happened with the Rashi's Daughters trilogy.

The research on Talmud, the feminism, the political world of Medieval France, the astronomy, the astrology, Muslim Spain, Muslim marriage customs, Medieval midwifery, plagues, textiles, dyes, inter-city trade, numerology, Christian Priests studying Bible with Rashi, the economics of Jewish merchants traveling with ransom money because Jews ransom other Jews, Jewish women in business lending money to other Jewish women in secret from their husbands, raising chickens, open sewers, -- all of that is like the individual instruments in an orchestra all playing different parts of a symphony at the same time, each trying to be louder than the other, grabbing center stage for a solo while all the other instruments scream for attention.

It's no surprise to me that so many commenters on amazon couldn't make sense of these historical fiction novels.

It's an orchestra without a conductor.

I'm very familiar with this problem from a writer's point of view.

The Rashi's Daughter's trilogy reads a little bit like the early drafts of my Sime~Gen novel, Unto Zeor, Forever.

As I mentioned last time, that's my first award winner, and it went through 5 drafts to get there.

Here it is on Amazon in Kindle, but there are paper editions and a forthcoming audiobook edition (unabridged)

It is labeled, by this publisher as #2 in a "series" -- but it's not. It's the second published in the Sime~Gen Universe, and many people have fallen in love with the novels by entering here.

I lost the first few drafts, but a very close version of the 3rd draft has been assembled and posted online for free reading. It's titled Sime Surgeon (like a Nurse Nancy which is what it was at that stage), and has a long introduction explaining the editing history.

http://www.simegen.com/sgfandom/rimonslibrary/surgeon/ and click the links on the left for the various parts.

Jean Lorrah commented extensively on the 3rd draft, and I made vast changes because of what she understood and misunderstood (just like the amazon comments on Rashi's Daughters). Jean saw the "oil and water not mixing" in that 3rd draft, didn't quite know how to explain the problem or the solution, but with close study, I was able to see what she was driving at and made many changes.

The 4th draft was turned in to the publisher, and the editor, Sharon Jarvis, sent it back with numerous notations, plus the advice that if I would delete one character, eliminate one entire chapter, and shift the climaxes so that they rose in a smooth hyperbolic curve to the final one, then she'd publish it. The Sime Surgeon climax structure rises, falls hard, rises, falls, rises to the end. She wanted the falls removed by removing one character, which eliminated a lot of techno-babble. Many fans love Sime Surgeon much better than the commercially smooth Unto Zeor, Forever -- just as some Amazon commenters love Anton's trilogy as it is.

The final draft of Unto Zeor, Forever was published, and because of Sharon's insistence on unifying the theme, eliminating all elements distracting from the theme, deleting a lot of the researched real-world-facts and the imaginary facts, answering character motivation questions with show-don't-tell, that published version won an award -- essentially because it's shaken not stirred.

But Unto Zeor, Forever was never drafted as a series of incidents. It had a plot from the first glimmering of an idea, a strong plot welded inextricably to a story that is essentially, at bedrock, a Romance of Helen of Troy proportions, just as Anton's trilogy depicts the Romances of Rashi's Daughters that produced the children whose Commentaries on Rashi shape what we know today of his Commentaries.

Sharon Jarvis, as editor, could not have brought the manuscript of Unto Zeor, Forever up to publishable standards had Jean Lorrah not "shaken not stirred" the composition into a somewhat finer emulsion.

Anton's trilogy was published at a development stage somewhere between Unto's 3rd and 4th drafts -- still in layers of historical fact and imaginary fact floating on top of a narrative but not integrated with it.

Her historical fact is what's known about Rashi and his writings, what's known about the world events at the time he lived, and what's known about the technologies and trade practices of that time, and of course the men the daughters married and the children the daughters had. Her imaginary facts are the personalities and feminist attitudes of Rashi's Daughters. Her plot is a series of incidents that may have seemed like "show don't tell" application of her research discoveries, but isn't.

It's as if, along with all her research on Rashi, Anton also researched "how to write novels" -- found "show don't tell" and then applied that with workmanlike diligence.

Anton's trilogy does have a kind of wandering "because line" -- as I've explained in previous posts on plotting.

Here are some of my posts on Integration that pertain to what's missing in Rashi's Daughters, discussing techniques one at a time:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/01/verisimilitude-vs-reality.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-3-game.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/plot-vs-story.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/gold-under-ice-by-carol-buchanan.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/worldbuilding-building-fictional-but.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/05/carol-buchanan-on-writing-tricks-and.html

That last post in the list is by Carol Buchanan who is a historical fiction writer whose product is so thoroughly blended you can't separate the layers at all. And her work is precisely true to the Historical genre -- it's just about an era the big publishers aren't pursuing right now. But that's true of Rashi's Daughters, also.

If you've read Buchanan's Gold Under Ice as I recommended, use that instead of Unto Zeor, Forever, and think about it with Rashi's Daughters in mind. Do a contrast/compare. Chances are you know more about the Montana Goldrush era and the Civil War than you do about the very early years of the Crusades when Rashi lived.

Consider the effect that a full blending of techniques can achieve and then decide which effect you want. A professional writer needs to be able to achieve the effect he/she intends - not at random or by inspiration but on purpose.

Anton's trilogy isn't really romance, or really historical, or fantasy or paranormal genre. The trilogy is a mixture, a "cross-genre" mashup, just as Unto Zeor, Forever was when it was published.

In the future, we may look back and see how Anton started a new genre! If you find imitators of her work, please drop a note on this blog entry. Separating "oil" from "water" may become a popular writing style, and if so, then you need to master it as well as "shaken not stirred."

To see how Unto Zeor, Forever affected one woman from the time it was published all the way to a re-reading after the field of Science Fiction Romance appeared, see my blog entry:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/is-there-taboo-against-romance-in.html

Where I wrote:
--------QUOTE-------------
In 2010, I found my name mentioned (via feeddemon search) in an Australian blog and discovered a woman who had read UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER years ago, and only now, on re-reading realized that it is indeed SCIENCE FICTION ROMANCE and belongs with the modern books she likes. That's why UNTO stood out to the point where she had obsessed over it. At that time, it was almost unique as an "Alien Romance" - and now it belongs to a genre.

http://lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com/2010/05/rachel-needs-book-advice.html

(if that link doesn't work, look in the archive of the blog for the entry of May 13, 2010 )
----------END QUOTE-------------

Isn't it odd that this blogger's name is Rachel? That's Rashi's youngest daughter's name, and the title of the book which mentions the Medieval techniques of creating black dye for textiles which I used in House of Zeor.

And here's another karmic echo -- on lovecatsdownunder.blogspot.com Rachel wrote:

----------QUOTE FROM LOVECATSDOWNUNDER ---
I’ve been reading historicals as my main genre of pleasure for a couple of years now. Thing was, I’d been resisting reading them because I was such a huge Jane Austen fan, and… well, I don’t know what I thought, but once I found them I was hooked and I realized I'd wasted heaps of years in not reading them!

Obviously I’ve been reading other genres in there as well, but more than 50% would have been historicals. I found some fabulous, fabulous authors who are now autobuys.

But I’m starting to get itchy feet.

I’m thinking the next genre I want to fall into will be romantic fantasy. Maybe with some romantic science fiction thrown in. I read a fair bit of fantasy and science fiction when I was a late-teen early-20’s gal—things like, Mists of Avalon (boy did I love that book at the time); Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (laugh? I *still* laugh at lines I read then); Unto Zeor Forever (the first book I remember being obsessed about, and then trying to glom the author, Jacqueline Lichtenberg); Dune (the whole series); plus a heap of Arthur C Clarke and other sci fi big names.

This was before I found romance. And looking back, the only one on the list that’s really a romance (and probably the only one of all the books I read at the time) is Unto Zeor Forever. Interesting that it was the romance that I obsessed about the most, yes?

--------------END QUOTE-------------------

So what is "getting to" these readers, getting under their skins, invading dreams and creating obsessions?

My answer is "shaken not stirred."

It's the Integration Technique that glues your real-world-research facts to your imaginary facts to your characters to your story to your plot.

The only way I know of to achieve the Integration of all these story telling elements is on the level of Theme.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of Mists of Avalon mentioned by Lovecatsdownunder taught me to start the final draft by stating the story in one sentence (screenwriting element called the pitch), identify whose story it is, and distill the theme (the point of the tale) into a single sentence. Tack a 3X5 card (today make a "STICKY NOTE" on your monitor desktop) to the wall behind your desk and test every sentence, every word-choice, against that list. Anything (and I mean anything) that doesn't exemplify the theme gets deleted.

In the more basic posts, I've examined what a theme is and how to identify it in novels that others have written.

Identifying your theme in a novel you have written is much endeavor.

A "theme" is not a single idea, a single voice in the orchestra. A theme, just as in music, is a repeated sequence -- a sequence you play with, run variations on, uptempo and downtempo. A theme can be a sequence of chords -- it can be very complex in music, but is easily identified by the trained ear. Think of the tiny bit of music that plays every time Captain Kirk walks into a scene in Star Trek. Other shows do the same thing -- identify the appearance of the main character with a theme.

In novels, a theme is a set of related ideas which trigger a set of related emotions.

In novels, the word-choice relates the theme to a set of emotions. That's called semantic loading.

Just as in music, the "ear" of the listener may be well trained, untrained, or partly deaf in some frequencies and ultra-sensitive in others.

Readers experience chords of emotions -- whole swaths of related emotions conditioned into them by "life" as they have experienced it, and by their dreams as they wish to experience them. (two levels - oil and water). The brain "lights up" in the corresponding areas as the writer triggers those emotions in the reader, bringing first one then another to dominance.

In Kabbalah there are seven "primary" emotions defined. Fiction combines those seven in different proportions -- and again, oil and water.

Think of the color scales and how we obtain certain shades by combining primary colors.

Emotion works the same way. And like music, emotion has as it's backbone structural element, rhythm.

Rhythm is created not by the BEATS -- but by the silence between them.

Next week, in Part 4, we'll get technical.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
For more on Gemara, check this out:
http://www.beverlyhillschabad.com/gemara.htm

Cyber Robin Hood

2012-01-22T11:28:00.000-05:00

     At least the Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest saw the so-called rich that he robbed. He could be said to have a good faith belief that if his victim dressed like a rich person, traveled like a rich person, spoke like a rich person, smelled like a rich person (etc, etc) he probably was indeed able to afford having the moneybags and jewels on his person at the time ripped off.

     Also, the Robin Hood of medieval times (if he actually did give to the poor) probably saw them, and could deduce from their clothes, deportment, speech, the state of their hands and feet (and so forth) that they were underfed and underpaid.

     Cyber Robin Hoods rip everyone off. They have no way to know, for instance, whether the "millionaire" author that they are ripping off is in fact a single mother, waiting tables by day or night to make ends meet, and writing every day at three am.

     Similarly, the so-called "poor" who allegedly cannot afford to purchase the movie and e-book treats that Cyber Robin distributes, nevertheless own e-readers, computers, high speed internet access and can afford to pay the pirate a nominal monthly subscription for access to his links. They can afford a subscription to the hosting site so they can quickly and efficiently download illegal copies of "complimentary" movies and e-books. Moreover, the advertisement aggregators obviously have a good faith belief (if one believes the pitch about life-style-targeted advertising) that these "deserving poor" can afford luxury cars and high-end tech products.

   Was Robin Hood the first romantic mugger? Why does literature of a certain type glorify pirates, highwaymen, spies and assassins? (Whether historical, modern, or futuristic). Is it simply because they live dangerous lives that make for page-turners and action-packed movies? Let's not forget modern computer games. What effect does Grand Theft Auto have on a person's morality?

     Give me my chess sets, Mancala, Reversi, and my Wii where the most violent and destructive game I play is careening into beach balls on a Segway with the intent to burst them!

By the way, if something as mild as SOPA caused such uproar.... maybe the reason is not all that meets the eye. It appears that many people signed The Petition multiple times under the impression that SOPA would take away their assumed "right" to "share" copyrighted e-books and movies. True. People were trying to stop the DMCA (from 1998) by petitioning against SOPA in 2011.

Bujold on SF Romance

2012-01-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

In the January LOCUS there’s an interview with Lois McMaster Bujold, who comments briefly on “hybrids of romance and science fiction.” She thinks creating such fiction is a difficult challenge because “the genres are kind of immiscible”—for this reason:

“One wants politically-driven stories in which characters gain status, and the other is more interested in romantically-driven stories where the characters gain mates. Different underlying biological drives are being served by these two different kinds of stories.”

I’ve never considered SF romance from that angle. I have reservations about Bujold’s analysis in that she seems to be defining science fiction too narrowly, focusing on only one of the many subsets of SF. Still, she makes an intriguing point.

As an aside, she makes an amusing remark about progressively narrower subgenre categories being like “overbred dog breeds that go past the point of being healthy anymore.” Not that she’s worried; she regards the process as an unstoppable “economic cycle” that, presumably, is self-correcting in the long run.

Any thoughts?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 2

2012-01-17T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last week:
http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/01/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html
we looked at a trilogy of historical romance stories about Rashi's Daughters.

I'm discussing how Maggie Anton's trilogy of historical romance novels with paranormal, supernatural, and spiritual elements blended in, fails because of a failure of orchestration of advanced writing techniques, namely the technique of integrating techniques.

Anton's trilogy does not fail because of a failure of either research technique or plotting technique by itself, though her plotting technique is not one that I respond to or use. But the two techniques applied separately produce an "oil and water" layered effect rather than an emulsion or a new chemical compound with unique properties (i.e. a Romance Novel).

I hope you have had time to consider these novels. Here's a link to them on amazon:

Maggie Anton

I don't know Maggie Anton personally, and have no idea what went on with the writing of these novels other than what it says in the books.

Here is a reader response on Anton's first novel from Amazon to consider indicating that the author's imaginary Jewish Culture of the Middle Ages stood out from, made an oil slick on top of, and obliterated all the rest of the romance novel stories in the books:

---------QUOTE-----------
3.0 out of 5 stars Good in general but Jewish life lacks authenticity, May 10, 2009
By
D. L. Lederman "leahiniowa" (Iowa USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This review is from: Rashi's Daughters, Book 1: Joheved (Paperback)
I am an Orthodox Jew who happens to deeply enjoy history and well-written historic fiction. I have strongly mixed feelings about this book. I am deeply impressed with the research that went into this book as well as Anton's ability to compile an enjoyable story from her research.

Unfortunately, it is clear that Anton does not know enough about living the type of authentically observant life that Rashi and his family enjoyed to write about these people without over-laying them with a 21st century mentality.

Those of us who follow the traditions given down from parent to child over the generations know that Rashi's daughters did not wear tefillin and learn Talmud because they were rebels. On the contrary, they were very holy women who followed the law to the letter. Judaism is, at its authentic pure level, NOT a sexist religion.

Further, those of us who live the observant lifestyle are aware at a bone-deep level the benefits of abstaining from prohibited activities. E.g., the prohibition against mature, unmarried men and women touching at all (not to mention "making out" or "snogging" or what have you), along with the observance of the laws of married life, create an intense, passionate bond between husband and wife. No intelligent woman (or man) who has lived this lifestyle and learned significant amounts of Torah (the term Torah is often used to include the Talmud, Mishnah, Midrashim, etc. - basically all of the accumulated studies) would be foolish enough to put themselves in a position such as the female characters in this book found themselves with their "beaux."

To clarify what one of the other reviewers stated, yes, Jewish women at that time were mostly illiterate - especially as regards to Judaic studies. But so were most of the Jewish men. Only the special few - those with outstanding mental abilities or those with the finances to pay for an education - were able to learn enough to read and/or write Hebrew. And learning more than that was even harder to accomplish.

On the other hand, Anton's portrayal of Rashi's mother as an active, educated intelligent woman who ran her own business is strikingly accurate. Plus, I enjoyed learning about the lifestyle and history of Jews living during the time of Rashi.

I really would have preferred to give the book 3 1/2 stars or even 3.75 stars, because I do think it is very well-written and interesting. Unfortunately, books which do not portray Torah true Judaism accurately tend to do more harm than good. From the other reviews I have read, this already seems to be the case.

------------END QUOTE----------

And here is a reader response posted on Amazon on one of my novels, House of Zeor, which indicates that applying the integration technique I'm discussing causes readers to be able to absorb the imaginary culture of imaginary characters even when it differs starkly from anything familiar:

------QUOTE------------
5.0 out of 5 stars Only the beginning . . . of a great series, November 4, 2011
By J. A. Davis "firedrake54" (Ontario, CA)
This review is from: House of Zeor (Sime~Gen, Book 1) (Kindle Edition)
I can't tell you when I first read "House of Zeor", but it was back when I was thin and my hair wasn't. I found it amazing, when, last month, after not reading it for perhaps 20 years, I picked it up and was immediately transported back into a fondly (and well) remembered world. This book is one of the most complex, painfully realistic and memorable psycho-sociological thrillers I've ever read, and the foundation for an entire universe of stories, the complexity and beauty of which would definitely win awards at Arentsi (and you'll have to read it to find out what that means).

Ms. Lichtenberg, her eventual co-author for later books, Jean Lorrah, and the entire community of Sime-Gen worldbuilders have imagined characters, societies and situations that embed themselves on your brain and don't let go. I suppose it's indicative of something that I remembered many of the terms used in House of Zeor for decades -- mostly Sime-specific curse words, I confess, but they're used in context so clearly you have no problem knowing exactly what they mean.

I've been reading science fiction for nearly 50 years (yes, really). I can count the number of authors and series that have stuck with me this well easily on two hands, and I've read a LOT of SF in those years. The Sime-Gen books make you want to KNOW these people, and make you CARE about what happens to them . . . and their society, which comes painfully to the brink of collapse and ultimate calamity.

I've heard them called "vampire-analog" stories, "chick books" and more, but at base, what they are is good stories, well told, about characters you can get into.

READ THEM!
-----------END QUOTE-------------

House of Zeor illustrates how readers respond to a "new chemical compound" and how that response differs from the response to "oil and water."

There are also comments on Anton's novels from non-Jews and from Jews who know less about Judaism than most readers of this blog know about Simes.

In the comments on Anton's novels, notice how the Medieval Jewish culture - the truly "alien" culture - of a small town in France leaps out and dominates the reader commentary.

Most of the reader comments on Sime~Gen focus on trying to explain the background to prospective readers because that background is the compelling force that shapes the characters. Readers feel you won't understand why the characters do what they do without that background, but it's the characters and their effect on their civilization that the reader wants to tell you about.

That's what I feel the effect the Rashi's Daughters trilogy ought to have because all the characters were shaped by Torah and Talmud study an even smaller minority interest in those days than now, and much less accessible then than now.

But the comments on amazon are not explaining points of Talmud that you need to understand the character motivation, or what the reader learned from the novel that they applied to life with some success.

On the SimeGen Group on facebook, fans are always talking about whether they "identify" with Sime or Gen. Non-Jewish readers of this trilogy are not saying that for the time it took to read Anton's books they knew what it felt like to be a Jew in Medieval France. They got a glimpse of life in Medieval France, they didn't live there for a time.

Fans of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels often relate how they "grew up on Darkover."

Note how Robert A. Heinlein's fans talk about how his novels inspired them to learn math and science. Or Isaac Asimov's fans. Fans of Star Trek talk about how Roddenberry's creation led them into career tracks.

The comments on Rashi's Daughters are not relating how people are dashing off to learn the real Torah and Talmud after becoming enchanted with her fantasy version of Torah and Talmud. How many are reporting they enrolled their kids in Yeshiva? But science fiction fans who grew up on Heinlein have kids on track to become famous astronomers, N.A.S.A. engineers, etc.

Keep in mind, it's my opinion that Anton wrote these novels as a polemic in modern feminism touting feminism to young Jewish women, hoping they would become feminists not Torah scholars. Oil and water. Some readers react to the oil and some to the water.

There are technical, writer-craft, reasons for that contrast in response between Heinlein/Roddenberry and Anton.

It is not a difference in the basic material or the story. No place or time could be more alien to the modern reader than a Jewish Quarter in a small French town during the Crusades and the fall of Rome -- Darkover was easier to relate to.

Anton's historical Jews are alien to the modern Jew, and the dangers of Medieval France are just the same as in any Historical Romance with knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, and arranged marriages.

It is a difference in the application of writing craft techniques. It's not that Science is more interesting than Torah. It's simply a difference in how the "researched" (or factual) material is used to generate the fictional structure.

Being a professional writer means being able to get the reader-response you aim to get by using the tool that triggers that response.

Maggie Anton has probably gotten the reader response she was aiming for -- but not the response I would have aimed for had I decided to write about Rashi's Daughters.

And I'm only guessing, but I think she may not have known that the material about the Medieval Talmud Academies she had become enchanted with could be incorporated into a historical romance novel using the exact techniques perfected by science fiction writers decades ago.

The "technique" I'm referring to here is the "integration" of two (and sometimes more) of the basic techniques I've discussed on this blog in previous posts. The integration tool that's most useful is "theme" which we've discussed at length.

Anton has a theme. I suspect it might best be stated as "Feminism is not new."

To illustrate that theme, she's created an alternate universe fantasy history. Since she failed to use the Science Fiction techniques I'm discussing (she may know them and just didn't use them) her readers are calling her down for inaccurate or bad history -- possibly because her readers haven't read a lot of alternate-history fantasy such as Katherine Kurtz pioneered.

Her readers are miffed at the historical errors because Anton didn't lull them into a "suspension of disbelief" by telegraphing that she knows the "real" history that the reader already knows, but will now play a fun game re-arranging that history to tell a story that will pose interesting questions.

She could have created Rashi as a cross between Spock and Sherlock Holmes that would have rocked this nation. She didn't. Rashi himself hardly gets a word in edgewise, and when he does, it isn't the word "Logical" which would have been the author's wink at the reader soliciting the suspension of disbelief.

The readers who don't know enough to spot her historical errors believe her version of history and like it, maybe prefer it. Other readers are distressed by ignorant readers being taught inaccuracies, with never a clue that this is actually fantasy.

And then there are the real nuggets of historical fact Anton has uncovered which contradict what people in the modern world think they know about Rashi's time and lifestyle!

The knowledgeable reader rejects those nuggets along with the warped facts, not being able to distinguish one from the other -- all for the lack of writing techniques, most especially Research-Plot integration.

All that could have been avoided by treating the hard facts, the warped-facts, and the imaginary facts with a science fiction writer's techniques. Poul Anderson comes to mind. Vernor Vinge.

The readers who are calling her down for her historical inaccuracies have completely missed enjoying the Romance stories in this trilogy because their attention was distracted from the foreground story to the background setting.

Please note that the number of reviews Amazon has posted on Anton's novels far exceeds those on my novels. There are a lot of technical (internet world related) reasons for that (Amazon has erased lots of reviews posted on my titles as they upgraded their computers).

But there is also the fact that Anton's work hits a far more popular topic than I have ever tackled, and was very well published to its exact audience at precisely the time Amazon was growing fastest.

One would conclude I have no business dissecting her product, but should rather be emulating it.

But I have read Marion Zimmer Bradley's SF/Fantasy novels, especially the hottest Alien Romance novel I've ever read, her Planet Wreckers. I have read the Lensman Series (oh, did I have a crush on Kimball Kinnison and a case of envy for his red headed Soul Mate). I have read C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner and Chanur series. I have read Ursula LeGuinn's Left Hand of Darkness. I have read all of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels, and a lot of her historical horror novels. I've read a lot of historical novels (a certain Scotland based historical time travel series pops to mind.) I used to be a Western Romance fan! I have read dozens of Vampire Romance novels with varying "rules" for the Vampire species. And I've read all of Robert A. Heinlein, and dozens of others who blend real science, imaginary science, and a special "take" on human personality seamlessly into their plots.

I somehow don't "hear" an echo of that kind of reading exposure behind the reviews of Maggie Anton's novels by those who liked them.

If you don't know what can be done with the Research-Plot integration technique, you won't miss it at all, and you'll think Anton's novels are really fine novels.

If you read the novels that are there, it's true that they are good. But I'm a writer. I read the novel that could have been there and compare it to the novel that is there -- if they're not the same, I try to figure out what to change to make them the same.

In this case it's the Integration techniques that are missing.

As I said above, the plotting technique choice didn't work as well as other choices might have.

Anton's books aren't actually "novels" in the structural and technical sense. They are strings of anecdotes lightly glued together. That's what produces many reader comments about "couldn't put it down." The reader will race through the anecdotes with the feeling that the beginning of the story is imminent, and then find themselves at the last page of the volume thinking they've read a novel. They didn't. They read a book, yes, but not a novel.

Perhaps I just have higher standards in Romance Novels than the readers who loved this trilogy because I found the structural and technique omissions glaring and jarring.

None of the writers I admire who have written novels blending facts you can get out of an encyclopedia with imaginary characters, real historical characters, and a specific idea of how the world's affairs have been managed, are being managed, and might become managed, would ever have failed to make this integration of plot and research smooth and in-detectible.

As far as I can tell just from reading, Anton made no attempt to blend research and plot, nevermind create a smooth emulsion.

I learned how to do that integration by hatching an ambition to write like those writers I listed above. I dissected their work to find out how they did it, then applied that technique to what I had to say, and according to the responses I've been getting on the SIMEGEN Group on Facebook, I succeeded.

Most of you who have read this far must be very frustrated because I'm not laying out exactly how to do this Integration yet. I'm going to try to explain it, but I am pretty sure many busy readers of this column need time to read at least one of the Anton novels and possibly to explore Sime~Gen.

Meanwhile here is an example from Rashi's Daughters Book III, Rachel -- of a bit of Anton's research which sits like "oil" on top of the emotional waters of her story. And don't yell. Last week I did promise you a spoiler and a connection to House of Zeor, and here it is.
---------QUOTE FROM BOOK III RACHEL p353 of the Trade paperback --The main character is talking to a trading partner who deals in dye and wool.-------------

..."But why are some black?"

"The abbess at Notre-Dame-aux-Nonnains was inquiring after fabric so I asked Simon to prepare some for her," Rachel explained. Nuns took a vow of poverty, but the local abbess came from a noble family and refused to wear anything but the highest quality fabrics.

Simon turned to Pesach. "True black is one of the most difficult shades to obtain. Each dyer has his secret formula; mine involves lamp soot." He motioned the pair back indoors, where he slowly unrolled a small bolt of brilliant purple.

Rachel gasped. "This is exquisite." She couldn't resist stroking the material. "I thought Eliezer couldn't find any Tyrian purple, or did you mix scarlet and indigo?"

Simon allowed Pesach to answer. "I found some, although Eliezer judged it too expensive. But the other dye merchants in Toledo said Tyrian purple was particularly scarce this year, so I gambled and bought some on credit."

-----------END QUOTE-------

Now there are some obscure facts about the beginnings of the dye industry that few people know, and it's inherently interesting. It is related to the world of this novel because Rachel is in business with another of her sisters who raises sheep for wool and had to import rams from England to get the kind of wool that can take the expensive dyes of the time. I know this stuff is true from other sources.

This snatch of dialogue advances the plot element of the side-business of cloth merchanting the lead character is in. It's not wholly extraneous, and it reveals a lot about the trade-world around this little village. Worse, all the characters in the scene already know all this and have no business talking as if they don't. Maybe the scarcity and trade details might be discussed in dialogue - but there's really no dramatic reason for this dialogue.

If you examine the scene this dialogue is in, and compare it to the discussions we've had here about scene structure and dialogue, you'll see that the scene isn't actually a "scene" -- there's no conflict driving the scene, no rising action, no emotional change, and no climax to the scene, leading to a hook onto the next scene. The author may believe that all these elements are in the scene, because she tags the end of the scene with a worded thought about her husband who is neglecting the cloth business for his studies in astronomy.

See my blog post of DECEMBER 27, 2011 - Dialogue Part 2 - On And Off The Nose

Anton's Rachel character's husband (the son-in-law of Rashi) is, in this fantasy, involved in the studies in Spain where astronomers may have figured out that the Earth revolves around the Sun centuries before Galileo -- and very possibly those Moorish inspired Spanish Jews may be the source of Galileo's inspiration, or he might have originated the idea on his own. You can see why I love this trilogy!

There's no reason for this scene, though, except to showcase some of the research the writer did. You could cut this exchange about dyes and you wouldn't lose anything except that "window" into the "world" of Medieval France. It's decoration. It's nice. But it's not essential. It says to me that the writer just couldn't bear to leave out all that hard work she did, so she couched it in dialogue and used Rachel's business venture as an excuse to include it. If I were the editor, I'd have cut it with a big red X through it. (my editors did that to me a lot; I learned)

To me, personally, though, this bit of dialogue is the best thing in the whole trilogy!

This obscure bit about black dye being difficult, proprietary secret, and very easy to spot against the kinds of colors cloth had been able to hold in those days was, I thought, common knowledge for at least 10 years before I wrote House of Zeor and invented "Farris Black" as a special color. I learned it so long before writing House of Zeor that I have no memory of learning it, I just know it.

Jean Lorrah, who joined me writing Sime~Gen after Unto Zeor, Forever was written, did not know this historical fact about black cloth dye and I had forgotten how I knew it and couldn't prove it when she challenged me.

My fictional House of Zeor is famous in the textile business, in the crude bathtub chemistry of dye manufacture and wool dying. They do all kinds of small-batch chemistry that's related to textiles, agrochemistry, and medicinals. Nowhere in any of the 12 volumes in this Universe is there any dialogue even vaguely resembling this snatch I've quoted for you.

When the Zeor Householding members are faced with the problem of identifying a particular genetic line of people who are medically vulnerable, Zeor does that by clothing them in this very special black -- it's used on edging, fringes, belts, emblems, medical case file flags and chevron stripes, and on entire clothing ensembles at different points in the several thousand years of Zeor's history.

It's always referred to as Farris Black -- not just any black. This is a special color, a shade that leaps right out at you. You can't miss it. Over the centuries of the Sime~Gen saga, it becomes the custom and eventually a rule with the force of law that ONLY those of the Farris genetic strain may wear this color. Nobody else would want to -- it could be a life or death issue if you were treated medically as if you were Farris. Later, when it's not so special, special shapes and items become the label.

Nowhere in the Sime~Gen novels do two characters who already know all about the dye business discuss the sources or applications of dyes.

So there's the Sime~Gen/Rashi connection I promised you last week. Farris Black.

Eventually here, we'll probably talk about the second published Sime~Gen Novel (a novel I modeled on the typical "Doctor Novel") Unto Zeor, Forever, (my first award winner) and the medical profession research I did for that one -- and what Robert A. Heinlein said about it after he read it. Of all the novels I've written, that was the only one I deliberately did research for with the specific intent of crafting that particular novel from the research.

All other research I've used in my novels has been like that Farris Black example, something I've known so long I don't know where I learned it. Many times, though, I have had to go look up details that I wanted to include to fact-check before including. In some instances, I've used astronomical calculators and programs that help predict the orbit of a world around another sun. But Unto Zeor, Forever is a specifically researched-to-write novel. I hope you won't find any evidence of research in that novel, though.

So you might want to read Unto Zeor, Forever first and compare it to Rashi's Daughters.

Rashi's Daughters also has a whole lot of medical research into medieval and Jewish Medieval medicine and especially midwifery larded into the text. Some of that medical research is well integrated, and some is not. Many times whole birthing incidents are incorporated simply to illustrate the midwifery techniques. The birth of a child who will become a significant influence on the course of history makes it seem that the birthing scene advances the plot -- but often that Integration technique just isn't there.

Perhaps you want to find pair of Historical Romance novels to compare. You want to find a novel that has obviously been researched for decades, that the writer is so very proud of their research and the publisher is selling it on the authenticity of the research. And then find one which has even more information in it but you can't tell it's been researched at all -- you can only see that some of the things in it are real facts, and some things obviously made up just for fun.

Your personal library may already have two really good examples to work on.

Once you've tried to figure out what one writer did that the other writer did not do (and which you'd rather emulate) -- then move on to the next Part in this blog series "Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance."

By the way, I learned this method of deconstruction, dissection, and distillation of techniques to discover and apply writing techniques to my own work from a correspondence course on writing from The Famous Writer School (which I do not recommend at all!).

I've seen how Blake Snyder applied this dissection method to create his SAVE THE CAT! film genres -- and I don't think he got it from the Famous Writer's School.

You don't need a teacher to learn this. But you do need a pair of books you didn't write, one of which represents the kind of book you want to write. Find and study two such novels, and come back next week for more thoughts on how to learn and apply Research-Plot Integration to your own work.

Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Exile, Execute, Incarcerate, Enslave... or what?

2012-01-15T12:56:00.000-05:00

How do you handle an undesirable prisoner? (In fiction, specifically in alien romance fiction.)

In Lexx (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx), criminals' organs were harvested on a mechanized assembly line without the benefit of anaesthetics or any other drugs (of course!) and the remains were utilized as organic fuel (food) for the dragonfly-like, organic spaceship, Lexx.

Some victors would play with their prisoners, or with their body parts. For instance, on the FIFA site, http://www.fifa.com/classicfootball/history/game/historygame2.html it claims

"One theory is that the game is Anglo-Saxon in origin. In both Kingston-on-Thames and Chester, local legend has it the game was played there for the first time with the severed head of a vanquished Danish prince."

That appears to be an isolated, and not particularly efficient solution to the problem. Possibly the Orcs use of
severed heads as cannonballs (in LOTR) was more practical, and also more demoralizing to the enemy.

Ancient Romans would either enslave prisoners, or make gladiators of them, or assimilate them. In one of the Star Wars Prequels (Clone Wars?) there were gladiator pits, but inconvenient prisoners were intended for amusing execution, rather than being given a fighting chance.

At one time, the British exiled prisoners, shipping them off to "the colonies" or "the Antipodes", for instance, which has always struck me as rather unfair to the native peoples. One of Anne McCaffrey's series (Freedom's Landing) used captives as experimental colonists, to demonstrate whether or not a new world was suitable for annexation.

At other times, the British housed prisoners in unseaworthy "hulks", or prison ships. Americans used islands... and still do. Russians sent prisoners off to Siberia. Captain Kirk was sent to an isolated prison camp to work in the mines on the frozen asteroid Rura Penthe, in The Undiscovered Country.

In theory, someone imprisoned on their own planet has a chance of escape without outside help. Space is an insuperable barrier to escape, unless one has rescuers, or magical time-travel abilities, or is able to overpower the guards and steal a space shuttle or stow away on a supply ship.

Riddick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddick ) is a good example of a science fiction convict who makes good --sort of-- without the benefit of organized rehabilitation.

Assuming that one wanted to write an alien romance about someone who had escaped from long term incarceration, would it also be a Revenge story, such as The Count of Monte Christo? Otherwise, perhaps they could have done their time, and been released legally. Or they could be pardoned, rightly or wrongly.

Here is an interesting comparison of slavery versus imprisonment: http://www.stalags.com/ and also an explanation of post traumatic stress disorder. It seems to me that being wrongly convicted, and forced to work in prison would combine the worst of both situations.

Here is an article about the need to rehabilitate prisoners.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/05/john_wetzel_pa_secretary_of_co.html

That does not account for political prisoners. In a Machaivellian world, one might wish to turn prisoners into Manchurian candidates, or otherwise mess with their minds to make them useful. But, if they are celebrities, and recognizable, what does one do?

"The Man In The Iron Mask" would not be a plausible plot line unless one's world was a world of superstition, and one believed that to kill a king (for instance) would damn one's immortal soul, or set a precedent that might lead to one's own execution.

Honestly, if one were evil enough to frame an innocent man --or arbitrarily throw a rival into the science fiction equivalent of an oubliette-- is there any plausible reason why one would not kill them?

Time Cloak

2012-01-12T09:00:00.000-05:00

Scientists have discovered how to “hide” a moment in time:

Gap in Time

True, this phenomenon was produced only on an extreme subatomic level for an infinitesimal instant, but raise it to the macro level and think of the SF possibilities. At one point the article compares the concealment to an invisibility cloak. I was reminded of Spider Robinson’s LADY SLINGS THE BOOZE and its predecessors on the same premise, stories of devices that can stop time (sort of). The wielder of such an instrument appears to vanish because he’s moving so fast compared to the surrounding environment that he can’t be seen, and everybody else looks frozen to him. The same idea appeared in a STAR TREK episode. This real-life “time cloak,” however, doesn’t use the acceleration method. Apparently the experimenters literally removed a tiny splinter of time from the normal time stream.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Research-Plot Integration in Historical Romance Part 1

2012-01-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

Lately, we've been getting into what I consider "advanced" writing lessons.

"Advanced" doesn't actually mean you can't do it if you haven't done the previous work. But it does mean you have to be able to walk and chew gum, juggle some plates, wrangle a passel of kids, and shout at the mailman not to molest the dog, all at the same time.

Some people learn better under pressure, some people don't want to know how they do what they do, and some (like me) prefer to read the last chapter of the textbook first, then browse quickly through the first chapter and try the exercises and problems in the middle before deciding if there's anything worth learning in this textbook.

So here we are in the "middle" of learning to craft a novel, Romance or otherwise. I'm just more comfortable with the Romance plot dynamics than with plain, pure, action, or the kind of Mystery where the detective isn't personally involved in the issues raised by the crime and criminal.

In searching for clear writing lessons for you, I've stumbled on a trilogy of books, published by PLUME an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS (huge, international publisher - this is the big time publishing venue, folks!) which I'm sure the author and the editor believe are novels. And now a lot of writing students will think so, too, just because these got published by a big publisher (and are selling well.) They will be imitated.

If you have objected to my explanations of the importance of structure in crafting a novel, you may consider the high profile publishing of these three books to prove your point. But you might change your mind about that after you read some of one of these novels.

Some people, readers not writers or editors, who've read these books think they're novels, too.

In my judgement, they aren't novels, and I'm going to try to explain why I think that.

The explanation may not mean anything to you unless you read at least part of one of these books and contrast it to something like, say Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's St. Germain novels (or many of her Historical Horror genre items). But I'm sure most of you have read dozens if not hundreds of good Historical Romances, not to mention alternate history and time travel Romance.

These books are Historicals, set between 1040 and 1105 C.E.

Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels are set in that period (almost - she uses the 900's as a model) but in an alternate universe. If you haven't read the Deryni series, you probably need to. Start with Deryni Rising and move quickly on to see how Katherine's writing craftsmanship developed very quickly -- then contrast that with the 3 novels I'm talking about here.

Katherine Kurtz structures trilogies correctly. C. J. Cherryh structures trilogies correctly (though her earliest published work has a few nice flaws that you can learn from).

This author, Maggie Anton, did not structure her trilogy with that kind of high-craft precision. She used a different technique, also in wide use, but not nearly as effective. I don't know if that's because she'd never read Cherryh and Kurtz or if she chose a technique inappropriate to her material on purpose, or if she didn't know there exists a plethora of techniques for handling this kind of material so she didn't know she had a choice to make. I don't know Maggie Anton personally, though I know Cherryh and Kurtz personally and learned from them (we learned from Marion Zimmer Bradley and I don't know if Maggie Anton ever read MZB or met her).

Maggie Anton on Amazon

That link goes to the product page on Amazon that lists 4 items by Maggie Anton, this trilogy and a book about the subject. I couldn't find anything else with that byline, and I don't know if this author writes under other bylines.

From the list of what I don't know, you can see that I can only discuss this trilogy on the basis of what's actually in the stories and how they are structured -- and what might have been done with the raw research material. I can point you to where the various techniques I have discussed on this blog were not used, and so you can judge if the lack makes the text awkward or boring.

The trilogy does contain arranged marriages and true-love marriages, accidentally marrying a gay guy (or maybe he's bi though others he knows are gay), and even a bit of Medieval applied magic to spur sexuality within marriage. Each novel focuses on one of three sisters who have no brothers to follow in their father's footsteps -- the underlying theme is feminist. In fact, it's a very strong feminist polemic in spots.

There are some rather graphically detailed sex scenes, but not many. If that's what you read Romance for, these books will disappoint.

There are epidemic scenes where the disease is attributed to demons and the cures include blood letting and amulets against demons, and other standard practices in that time-frame. Great material for modern fantasy or Paranormal Romance.

Each of these three is billed as "A novel of Love" -- not specifically genre Romance -- "in Medieval France." On that, it actually delivers.

The trilogy seems to me to be even more awkward to market and sell than to write.

I'm going to discuss all three at once here, and I'll be rather more hyper-critical of the writing, the research, and the story itself than I usually am. I may say some things that might seem somewhat unkind, perhaps undeserved, about the author of this trilogy.

But I'm not talking to the author, or even about the author or editor since I don't know them. I'm analyzing a swatch of writing that I think needed more rewrite before publishing.

The other item in the pitch for these novels is the assertion that the research is good, deep and accurate. And as far as I can tell, that's mostly true.

Now to the third element in these novels that you need to keep in mind.

The novels are about the 3 daughters of a Talmudic scholar (the Talmud being the transcription of the explanation of the Torah (the first 5 books of the Bible, the story of Moses) that was given to Moses by God, the same explanation that was given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then on Mount Sinai for Moses to give to the people and lead them to the Promised Land.

This Talmudic scholar, known as Rashi, is studied today, and most printings of the Torah have either footnotes or extensive commentary by Rashi. Rashi also wrote a commentary on the Talmud, which is studied today. Rashi wrote the introductory commentary, the elementary and literal commentary (not the esoteric commentary known as Kaballah). It's almost impossible to enter the study of this material by any other route than by studying Rashi.

Studying Torah without having heard of Rashi would be like studying Geometry without having heard of Aristotle or Pythagoras. Or maybe like studying astronomy without having heard of Kepler.

So Maggie Anton picked out one whopping HUGE and important subject area to write about, the almost unknown 3 daughters of Rashi whose husbands and sons are also almost as famous as Rashi because of how they continued his commentaries, and commented on his commentaries, and founded Talmudic academy traditions of their own. Their mothers, the 3 daughters of these novels, are lost in obscurity -- and now rescued by Maggie Anton in a monumental feat of research and meticulous deductive imagination.

The research had to have been as difficult as what Katherine Kurtz did to write her George Washington saga, (during which research, I was treated to a blow-by-blow description of the feats required to gain access to obscure material)

Or her WWII novel about the magical battle for Britain against the Nazis.

To create the Romance novel trilogy, Anton had to create and add a great deal of material, just as these other writers had to do. My theory is that Anton was in over her head.

So here are Anton's novels. In the next parts of this blog-series, we'll get into spoilers, and even note The Sime~Gen Connection to Anton's trilogy. And there is a connection, but not philosophical. It has to do with research into medieval techniques for making dye for wool! Also for making woolen cloth, though I never mentioned that in House of Zeor.

There is a Kindle version, but it's in that "overpriced" range at $12.99 at least at the time I'm writing this. There are a lot of used copies, probably because they aren't rereadable or keepers.

I don't think these books are worth their price, in and of themselves. If you can get them from a lending library, or find a used copy, so much the better. You may want to take marginal notes as you learn from analyzing this material.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Feisty, Sassy, Snarky, or Just Obnoxious?

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

I recently read a paranormal anthology that I won’t name because I’m going to say some negative things about two of the stories. In both of them, the kick-ass werewolf heroine has to work together with the hero in a crisis against her wishes. In each case, the heroine takes an instant dislike to the hero and shows it with outspoken rudeness. These reactions appear motivated only by snap judgments based on first impressions. In the first story, the hero is a vampire and the heroine doesn’t like vampires in general; in the second, the woman’s aversion comes from a quick decision about what type of man the character is. In other words, the characters’ initial dislike for the heroes springs mostly from prejudice, not an attractive quality for a protagonist to exhibit. The guys might actually be arrogant jerks, but we see no real evidence of that hypothesis before the women preemptively jump to that conclusion. Any not so gentlemanly behavior displayed by the heroes could just as well be a response to the heroines’ hostility.

Of course, the “slap, slap, kiss” motif (as TVtropes.org labels it) has been around in romance since at least Shakespeare. Sparks flying in a spirited argument often ignite sexual sparks. Also, the feisty heroine who stands up for herself to everyone, including the hero, has become one of the most popular character types in current romance fiction. Few readers would accept a timid, submissive heroine these days. But there’s a difference between feisty or “kick-ass” and plain insufferable. To me, a character who goes out of her way to pick fights with a man she’s just met comes across as the latter. Hostility between hero and heroine needs to have a believable motive. That’s a case where “show not tell” is vital—the author should demonstrate in action that there’s a good reason why two sympathetic characters we’re rooting for nevertheless interact like the proverbial cat and dog.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Story Springboards Part 1: Art Heists by Patricia McLinn

2012-01-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

Today we have a wonderful article by Patricia McLinn on the romantic aspects of the Art Theif. We're all fans of Remington Steele, and It Takes A Thief, and now White Collar, but what is it about these television shows that are so fascinating to Romance readers?

Oh, and if you haven't read any Patricia McLinn titles, oh please do look up her novels! See end of her post for how to find her publications.

-----------GUEST POST BY PATRICA McLINN ------------

Fiction, as it turns out, is way better than fact when it comes to art heists.

But that’s starting at the end of this blog, and I should take you back to the start, which was my offhand Tweet wondering why art heists stir the imagination. That sparked a Twitter/e-mail exchange on the topic with my esteemed blog hostess.

From what seemed to be off the top of her head, Jacqueline listed nearly a dozen angles a fiction writer could pursue while playing in the art heist sandbox

--There's the historical importance - holding a piece of 
history

--There's profit - the black market fence has a client 
if you can get the painting or statue

--There's stealing it to keep it just for yourself, 
very personal, very intimate.

--There's maybe the thief is a reincarnation of the 
painter or the subject and just wants the thing and 
doesn't know why?

--There's the simple thing like climbing a mountain
 -- break through their security because it's there 
(like hackers).

--There's just hurting the owner because you don't 
like him/her/it.

--There's striking back at the nose-in-the-air 
art-patron public because you don't like them.

--There's "liberating" the art from the 
dog-in-the-manger owner so that posterity can 
have it (stealing from the Nazis).

--There's keeping it from destruction in a 
shooting war (think recent events in Egypt).

--There are all the things about Art that make 
it interesting -- and then there's the whole 
D&D board game fascination with STEALING (the 
Thief character with all sorts of sub-traits).

--There's the whole "magical" dimension of how 
great art depicts or connects to the human 
Group Mind -- and all the voodoo that 
can be done that way.

As a novelist, that list has me salivating. However, I also have a background in journalism, including being an editor at the Washington Post for mumble-mumble years. As Lawrence Block said in the title of one of his wonderful books on writing, I love TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT – but I want to know when I’m telling lies. Mark Twain gave great advice: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

So, I started checking into why the public finds art heists romantic and alluring, and the psychology behind art heists.

Sorry, folks, the experts agree that to the extent that the public finds art heists romantic and alluring, it’s because we don’t know the truth behind them. (Note to anyone writing an article about art theft: Cary Grant went after jewels, not art in TO CATCH A THIEF. Saw that wrong several places.)

Former Scotland Yard detective Charles Hill is reported to have said that stealing great works is less a daring act than a sign of an unimaginative thief [[http://www.simoleonsense.com/the-psychology-of-art-thieves]], because the thief is doomed to obtaining nothing near the true value of the art.

Yet thieves do steal art – reportedly as many as 20,000 pieces a year in Italy. [[http://www.artcrime.info/facts.htm]] Why?

Motivation One: USA Today [[http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-05-23-Parisartheist-motivation_N.htm]] quoted Joel Silberberg, Director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at Northwestern University, as saying, “If you look back historically at other pieces of stolen art, the motivation is idiosyncratic. Look at the Mona Lisa's theft — taken from The Louvre in Paris in 1911 by an Italian patriot. He resented that one of Italy's greatest pieces of art was being displayed in France. So you get individual motivation there, or a political motivation.”

(For more on the 100th anniversary of the Mona Lisa theft earlier this year, click here. [[http://blogs.artinfo.com/secrethistoryofart/tag/kempton-bunton]].)

Motivation Two: Said Hill: “Then there’s the trophy-hunting art thieves. They don’t make much money at all and cause themselves endless aggravation. But they enjoy doing it. It gives them a buzz.”

Let’s call those Crackpot 1 and Crackpot 2.

Motivation Three: Money. A few of the money-motivated art thieves might be stealing to fulfill an order from an unscrupulous art collector, but not many.

Instead, according to the experts, most of the money garnered from art thefts goes to –

And here’s where facts will forever change my view of the fiction.

-- organized crime and terrorism.

Yikes. Makes the crackpots look appealing by contrast. But the crackpots are in the minority when it comes to art thieves.

According to the website of the Association for Researching into Crimes against Art (known as ARCA[[http://www.artcrime.info/facts.htm]]): “Most art crime since the 1960s is perpetrated either by, or on behalf of, international organized crime syndicates.”

ARCA, citing information it “compiled from sources including Interpol, the FBI, Scotland Yard, Carabinieri, independent research and ARCA projects,” also says, “Art crime represents the third highest grossing criminal enterprise worldwide, behind only drugs and arms trafficking. It brings in $2-6 billion per year, most of which goes to fund international organized crime syndicates.”

That just ground my image of the dashing art thief into dust.

Two other areas of art theft (though not heists) that greatly concern the experts are fraud/forgeries (so the Audrey Hepburn-Peter O’Toole movie HOW TO STEAL A MILLION is practically a documentary, right?) and theft by destruction, most often perpetrated by repressive groups (think of the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamyan statues.)

So, have the facts taken all the fun out of the fiction?

Not, necessarily. First, of course, there’s that whole fiction thing -- as in we make stuff up. As fiction writers, we don’t have to adhere to the most statistically likely thing to happen.

Also, there are some intriguing elements among the facts.

Take ARCA.

Among other things, it offers a blog with current art-theft news [[http://art-crime.blogspot.com/]]. (Forgive them the incorrect “it’s”.)

There’s also the history of Noah Charney, founding director of ARCA. He says he developed an interest in art crime while researching a novel, THE ART THIEF.

“I am most interested in the field from a practical standpoint—how the academic study can help to inform contemporary law enforcement and art protection,” he says on his website[[http://www.noahcharney.com/bio.htm]]. In June 2006 he held a conference “in Cambridge entitled ‘Art Theft: History, Prevention, Detection, Solution.’ It was attended by the heads of the FBI, Scotland Yard, and Carabinieri Art squads (Vernon Rapley, and Col. Giovanni Pastore) as well as academics and art professionals with interest, if not previous experience, in the study of art crime” and since then, he says, he has forged alliances with the law enforcement experts.

How about pitting a Charney-esque character against a terrorist mastermind in a clock-ticking effort to protect, oh, say, a Vermeer exhibit?

If that doesn’t get your fiction-writing juices going, how about this:

The should-be-world-renowned Museum of Bad Art (MOBA), in Somerville, Mass., has been the victim of two art heists.

First, the painting Eileen was taken in 1966. According to the museum’s Wikipedia entry [[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Bad_Art]], “The museum offered a reward of $6.50 for the return of Eileen,” and donors later increasing the reward to $36.73. To no avail. A decade later, someone claiming to be the thief demanded a $5,000 ransom. MOBA refused. The painting was returned.

Despite a sign proclaiming "Warning. This gallery is protected by fake video cameras", another criminal struck in 2004, leaving a note demanding $10 for Rebecca Harris' Self Portrait as a Drainpipe. This time, the art was returned soon after the theft … with a $10 donation.

If these heinous crimes don’t stir your imagination, you are far too stolid a soul to be writing fiction.

~ ~ ~

Patricia McLinn [[http://www.PatriciaMclinn.com]] is the author of 26 novels, focusing (as much as she focuses on anything) on relationships. Many are now available as e-books at the major outlets. She encourages you to purchase those she’s indie published (without overtly urging you not to buy those from a publisher.) Her first non-fiction book – WORD WATCH: A Writer’s Guide to the Slippery, Sneaky, and Otherwise Tricky -- draws on her mumble-mumble years as an editor at the Washington Post and a lifetime of cranky reading. Her first mystery will be released in June 2012, and at that time she will encourage you to buy from that publisher.

You can follow Patricia at Twitter [[http://twitter.com/PatriciaMcLinn]] and Facebook [[https://www.facebook.com/PatriciaMcLinn]]. WORD WATCH Tweets [[http://twitter.com/WordWatchBook]] and Facebooks [[https://www.facebook.com/WordWatchTheBook]] for itself.

---------- END GUEST POST BY PATRICIA MCLINN -----------

POSTED BY JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Happy Last Year

2012-01-01T08:54:00.000-05:00

If every rational person, and every superstitious person came to the conclusion that the Mayans were correct, and that we will all go extinct this year (2012), how would your New Year's Resolutions be different?

You probably wouldn't pay your mortgage. Right? You might not bother to start dieting/exercising/stop smoking. There would be no point occupying Virgin Galactic or NASA, because they are unable to follow Stephen Hawking's advice and get a lucky few with pepper spray to that new, Earth-like planet that's been discovered.

In 2010, Stephen Hawking warned:

"I see great dangers for the human race ......

And

"....we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth, are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill."

He may have been thinking about radiation, global warming, and sustainability, rather than geo-political tensions and a level of social unrest that reminds me of the French Revolution... and apparently I am not alone, given that Governor Mitt Romney is quoted as comparing President Obama to the tragic queen of France, Marie Antoinette.

Governor Romney appears to be focusing on extravagance, and his unfair populist quote is historically suspect. No Historian, Mitt. Marie Antoinette got the short end of a very dirty stick from her contemporaries and from History.

However...

"....Marie Antoinette remained convinced of the divine right of kings. In coded letters from captivity, she describes the democratic ideal as a "tissue of absurdities"."

Apparently, the Commune Of Paris (think of a successful OWC) refused to allow Marie Antoinette a pair of nail scissors to trim her fingernails. (Think TSA).

Beaming back to Stephen Hawking.....
Is it possible that that Earth-like planet is already inhabited by intelligent beings? What if they are more intelligent than we are?

Hawking stated in an interview with The Times (of London, presumably), quoted here

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational”....The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans," he allegedly told the AFP.

(Think "Independence Day". Or "An Ant's Life". )

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet," Hawking has suggested. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach."

Ironically, this is exactly what Hawking appears to suggest that we ought to do.

And then, there is the Internet, which is becoming increasingly lawless.... which is why I think of the French Revolution when confronting online advocates for the abolition of copyright (through mass uncivil disobedience/ignorance of the law, of what is in the Terms Of Service of the OSPs and ISPs contracts they signed).

I sometimes wonder why Internet Service Providers and Online Service Providers publish "Terms Of Service" and those lengthy Agreements that everyone scrolls through to click the "I Agree" box.

Does anyone know?

Since SocialGo, for example, has no duty to monitor the content of its users, does it post this for Brownie Points?

You will violate the Service Terms if you or any Users do any of the following:

Copy, reproduce, duplicate, upload, post, host, display or perform (publicly or otherwise), market, advertise, promote, distribute, transmit, or otherwise disseminate any content or materials (including, without limitation, any related data or information):

that are illegal or otherwise promote or encourage any illegal activity (including, without limitation, hacking, cracking, or the distribution of counterfeit software, or any products or services derived from any such activities); or
that you do not own or have permission to freely distribute; or
that violates any laws or regulations worldwide.

And, when users DO violate the Service Terms, and this is pointed out to Social Go, why does Social Go turn a blind eye? Because they can? (And even SOPA or IP Protect would allow them to continue to do so.)

Here is an example of what I'm talking about.

It's a cynical promotional gambit by a shameless alleged copyright infringer who sells (for a lifetime subscription of $9.95 paid via PayPal) thousands links to illegally uploaded Fiction e-books, audio books, music albums, For Dummies educational works (Wiley sues downloaders, folks!) first run movies including (allegedly) the new "Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows", Real Steel,copyrighted games, software programs, and music albums.... including the new Disney compilation "Now That's What I Call Disney" six days before it officially went on sale on Amazon.

He is also paid (one assumes) by foreign site Filesonic.com, which pays commissions up to $17 per sale to resellers of Filesonic subscriptions (which make it possible to download a large file containing, for instance 380 For Dummies e-books), and which advertises "Make Money Sharing Links."

By the way, here's the joke of the century,

"Please note that FileSonic maintains a strict intellectual property policy. By using the service, you represent and warrant that you are the author and copyright owner and/or proper licensee with respect to any content and you further represent and warrant that no content violates the intellectual property rights of any third party."

Alas, Filesonic had a December promotion paying uploaders $35 for every 1,000 downloads. Do they think that Big Six bestselling authors really have the rights to undercut their publishers, and sell 1000 digital copies of their books for $35?

Via his groups on googlegroups and yahoogroups, the Freetard Bastard writes: (Approximately.... I have changed a few key words to protect the innocent.)

Celebrate the new year; grab vip membership for nothing!

Dear Members

Freetardbastard now offers standard digital parasites the opportunity to grab their 'lifetime' VIP membership to their club for nothing, to those that help spread the word!

All you have to do is simply invite 12 people (family, friends or work colleagues) to view their website... it's as easy as that, and you save $9.95

Full instructions can be found on the following page:

http://www.thefreetardgroup.com/images/vipfree.html

This is a nice bonus aimed at standard copyright infringers who are happy to promote the service and for those that can't afford to pay the VIP membership fee, but who would still like the extra benefits!

I wish you all a HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS NEW YEAR!

Regards

Max

FREETARD Club Admin

This message is being sent to you because you or the author are a member of ClubFreetard, a network created using SocialGO. If you are interested in creating your own network, please click here.

Disclaimer: Groups such as this change their name about as often as pirates change their underwear. To the best of my knowledge, none is to date called Freetard (prefer definition 2) so the links should go to a 404.

If no one can stop this sort of thing, and Google is allegedly spending a fortune to make sure no one can stop it, 2012 may not be the last year for the planet, but it could be the last year that American copyright law has any relevance. The Sans Culottes are occupying the Internet.

Happy New Year!

Holiday Greetings

2011-12-29T14:16:00.000-05:00

Happy Yuletide! Keep in mind that Christmas officially lasts until January 6 (Epiphany, aka Twelfth Night). According to THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS by Stephen Nissenbaum, in some parts of medieval Europe the celebratory season continued until February 2 (Candlemas, best known to us as Groundhog Day), when the agricultural labors of the new year had to begin. Nissenbaum's book reveals that the Puritans had good reasons, in their worldview, for banning Christmas festivities. The true "old-fashioned, traditional" Christmas wasn't what we think of. That family-centered holiday was invented in the nineteenth century. The REAL traditional Christmas would look to us like a combination of Halloween, Mardi Gras, Thanksgiving, and New Year's Eve. Besides the feasting that we've retained in our own customs, the season focused on heavy drinking, noisemaking, licentious behavior in general, reversal of social roles, and the lower classes wandering from house to house making more or less cheerful demands for food, drink, and money, as memorialized in wassailing songs. In most of premodern Europe (as Nissenbaum explains), December was the only part of the agricultural year when people had both leisure and plenty of food, the one time when fresh meat in abundance was available. It's interesting to contemplate how different life in that seasonal cycle was from our present-day culture, where refrigeration and global transport bring even the poorest of us a variety of foods even the rich couldn't have imagined in the preindustrial world. According to THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, it was just this pagan seasonal cycle that the Puritans wanted to obliterate. As Nissenbaum puts it, people had always celebrated the winter solstice with feasting and carousing, and the Church, in consecrating December 25 to the birth of Jesus, tacitly allowed the festivities to go on pretty much as they always had. Christmas "has always been a difficult holiday to Christianize."

From the very beginning of the family-centered Christmas in the Victorian era, commercialization has accompanied the holiday and observers have complained about greed obscuring the spirit of the season. C. S. Lewis in the 1950s wrote an essay about "Xmas" and Christmas, lamenting what he called "the commercial racket." Apparently some things haven't changed much in almost sixty years. Yet I realize in some ways Christmas as I knew it in childhood must have been quite different from my parents' childhood holidays in the 1930s. Likewise, our children and now grandchildren have had Christmases in some ways like "the ones we used to know" and in other ways clearly different.

Speaking of "the ones we used to know," how many people in the U.S. who grew up outside New England or the northern parts of the Midwest remember white Christmases? In most of the places we've lived that had snow at all, it was rare before January. Just one example of how culture and the media shape our expectations. My stepmother loved snow and always yearned for a white Christmas, something she probably never saw during her childhood in the tidewater area of North Carolina. Not to mention sleighs with bells!

Here's the full text of "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" by Connie Willis, a humorous fantasy tale in which the wish for a white Christmas gets fulfilled all too thoroughly:

Just Like the Ones We Used to Know

If you watched the TV series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, you’ll recall their solstice celebration, Winterfest, adapted for the conditions of their own small subculture. Imagine how our holidays will morph into new forms while retaining the "spirit" of their original meanings as we move forward through the twenty-first century and eventually travel from this planet into space.

And speaking of space, for a midwinter treat here's a page of links to holiday SF filk songs by Suzette Haden Elgin:

Ozarque's Journal

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Dialogue Part 2 - On And Off The Nose

2011-12-27T11:00:00.000-05:00

Part 1 of this series was not labeled Part 1, but it is:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/dialogue-as-tool.html

This Part 2 is an advanced lesson on writing. Below you'll find a links to a plethora of relevant posts I've done here previously, because the subject of Dialogue integrates all the techniques I've discussed.

And no, we're not talking here about characters who talk "down their nose" at other characters, or who stick their nose into others' business. The metaphor is about "hitting it on the nose." Saying exactly what you mean, defining things exactly, is "hitting it on the nose." You "hit it on the nose" when you "reveal" something very concrete and specific about a murky topic, when you clarify matters, when you eliminate confusion, when you shatter an illusion.

The term "on the nose dialogue" is from screenwriting, well, play writing too. On the nose dialogue is one reason that a script would be returned unread. If the first line of dialogue on page one is "on the nose" the script will be rejected.

This is often true in novel or story writing as well, though you might get 5 pages to show you know how to keep dialogue off the nose.

There is nothing more "murky" than the emotional life of a human being. When you "reveal" that inner dialogue as spoken dialogue, you are writing dialogue that is "on the nose." It's a tool in the writer's toolbox, and it can be used to devastating artistic effect, but first the writer must master that tool.

And the first step toward mastery is definition.

"Advertising copy" is a blatant example of "on the nose" writing.

An ad just says what it means. If it doesn't, you get the effect we see with so many TV commercials (which I have recommended you study for "show don't tell" techniques) where there's an amusing image or sequence, and you can't recall what product the ad is selling.

"Aflac" uses the repetition of the duck advising the injured that they need this insurance -- relying on the silly quack sound of the company's name to nail the message on the nose.

"Verizon" is having great success following Suzi's Lemonade stand to international corporation because of ease of communication using Verizon's tools -- but the commercial, while engaging, and on-the-nose about communications, doesn't differentiate Verizon from AT&T. Suzy might do as well with AT&T or another carrier, we can't tell from the commercial. But I do remember Suzy and I do associate her with Verizon, so it's a success.

Who can forget the "Energizer Bunny?"

So advertisements have to be "on the nose." If you're selling a better razor blade, show it in the garage in a puddle as months pass, and not rusting. Show someone picking it up, putting it in a razor holder, and shaving with it -- no cuts. If you're selling razor blades, show a razor blade. Show how yours is different from Gillette's.

That's on the nose.

People, on the other hand, in real life, don't talk "on the nose."

One of the reasons most books on the craft of writing don't actually help new writers learn the craft is that such books are usually about the craft -- i.e. OFF the nose, off the topic.

If you pick up a writing craft textbook, what do you expect to find inside? What topic should it cover?

As I was learning this craft, (and even today) the topic I keep hoping to find inside "how to" books on writing is what you do with your mind to create a story others will enjoy. You know about the craft or you wouldn't have found the book. Now you want to know the craft itself. You want to do it.

You need the concepts, some examples, and some ways to isolate specific craft functions and practice them in isolation.

That's like a piano student learning scales instead of whole musical compositions.

After you learn the scale, you try a short, small, composition using that scale, and you perform the composition. You don't start learning piano by writing your own compositions (most don't.) You start learning by performing someone else's compositions.

Writing is also a performing art, as I have said I learned from my first professional writing teacher, Alma Hill.

I've introduced you to some of the "scales" involved in writing: worldbuilding, conflict, theme, plot, characterization, etc. And now we're working on "Chopsticks" our first composition, "Dialogue."

What exactly is dialogue? Where do you get it?

In real life, women tend to keep their conversation (not dialogue; that's for fictional characters) farther away from the nose than men do. Workplace interactions (men or women in the USA) tend to be more on the nose than household interactions.

Of all the topics people converse about, Relationship and especially the Love Relationship, usually stay the farthest off-the-nose. They have to be off the nose if they are to communicate real, reliable, meaning.

Yep. The way to be reliably understood is to avoid saying what you mean!

In other words, in certain circumstances, to communicate you have to say what you mean, and in other circumstances you have to avoid saying what you mean in order to be understood.

Writers have to take that variation in behavior into account when creating dialogue.

Characters will speak differently to each other depending on where they are and what they're doing, as well as on who they are, and who they are to each other. Every line of dialogue you create is a synthesis of all the techniques we've explored so far.

Perhaps we should coin the term "dialogue-building" because writing dialogue is very much like worldbuilding.

Dialogue is not a recording of real speech. Dialogue is to real speech as a Japanese Brush Painting is to a Photograph. Dialogue is emblematic of speech. It's symbolic of speech.

Ultimately, great dialogue gives the firm illusion of real speech.

The line between a reader and a writer can easily be defined as the line between someone who perceives dialogue as speech, and someone who can see through that illusion to the gears-wheels-and-grease inside the dialogue that creates the illusion of speech.

People speak to each other because they have something to say -- to that person.

Many people get upset if you forward something they've written to you on to someone they don't even know (or worse, someone they don't like). The reaction is, "I would have written it differently if I'd known so-and-so would see it." People talk that way, too. Think about how specific our phrasing is in terms of who we expect to see or hear.

We put our real message, the real information we want another person to believe, in "subtext" not "text." That's why "keywords" don't really work -- to say something important, you don't use the vocabulary of that subject. If you use the vocabulary of that subject, then what you are saying will not be believed. It's the text under the text (the body language, tone of voice, choice of off-topic vocabulary, allusions, associations) that carry the real information. That tendency to use subtext (to talk with your hands, and blurt "you know" every few words) is the part of communication that a writer must emulate in dialogue but without the "you know" interjections. (because "you know" you don't really know which is why I'm telling you, "you know?")

That's why we phrase things we say in a special and different way for each person we talk to. The "subtext" or "relationship" is different, so the wording must be different.

Here are some of my posts mentioning subtext:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/12/flintstones-vs-lone-ranger.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/05/tv-show-white-collar-fanfic-and-show.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-exactly-is-editing-part-v.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-change-perception-of-romance.html

To maintain the illusion that your characters are real, you must take into account how they would talk differently to this character than to that character. That variance is learned under the topic of "Characterization."

Does this character talk to his boss differently than he talks to his father? If yes, then he's one kind of character. If no, then he's another.

Dialogue is not two characters talking to each other -- it's the writer talking to the reader through these two hand-puppets called characters.

The quality of the dialogue-writing is judged not on what the characters say to each other, but on how firmly the illusion is maintained that the writer does not exist, that the audience does not exist.

In stagecraft, that's called the Fourth Wall. It's the wall between the audience and the stage, the transparent wall we look through into this other world where the characters live, but that the characters see as a solid wall.

Break that illusion, and POOF - the rest of your illusions are gone. All that worldbuilding and arduous suspension of disbelief POOF, GONE.

So how do you maintain this illusion that these characters are talking to each other, not the audience? You use the set of techniques I've discussed in this blog as "Information Feed."

Here are four posts specifically discussing this topic, but from other angles.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/09/sexy-information-feed.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/10/heart-of-light-by-sarah-hoyt.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/11/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for_23.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/12/information-feed-tricks-and-tips-for.html

And you need to employ all the tips and tricks from my posts on the Expository Lump. You must never use Dialogue for either "Information Feed" or "Exposition" because that breaks the fourth-wall, the illusion that these characters are real people, the illusion that they're talking speech not dialogue.

Here are some posts on Exposition:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/08/source-of-expository-lump.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/02/dissing-formula-novel.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/06/crumbling-business-model-of-writers.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/source-of-expository-lump-part-2.html

Check out Part 11 of my series on Astrology Just For Writers which was posted on November 1, 2011

Here are some of my previous posts mentioning Dialogue:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/07/6-tricks-of-scene-structure-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/10/dialogue-as-tool.html

Now, to the example that may illuminate all this for you, so you can practice this composition, this "Chopsticks" rendition.

Listen to a great writer (I'm not kidding, this is one terrific writer) play Chopsticks on his characters.

Here is Simon R. Green who has such complete mastery of all these techniques that he probably can't tell you how he does it.

Here is a list of his more current titles:

List of Simon R. Green titles

Here's a new series he's doing which uses such blatant "on the nose" dialogue in the most appropriately inappropriate places that you know it's done as broad comedy:

The opening chapter is a great example to learn from.

The characters are a field team of ghost hunters approaching a building and setting up their equipment.

Green uses dialogue (which for these characters is workplace dialogue and should be "on the nose") to give you all the worldbuilding exposition and feed you all sorts of information on the characters and their most recent adventures. But he uses the "on the nose" dialogue to have the characters tell each other things the characters already know (a huge violation of all the rules of dialogue writing).

The genius in this piece is in the rhythm and pacing.

Green has captured the very essence of the earliest science fiction style of awkward, blatant and even childish dialogue, and he's done it in such a way that you know he knows he's doing it to you on purpose.

He's playing with you, the reader, in a subtle way of buddies. He telegraphs that he expects you to come into his world and play for a while, just for fun.

Your Assignment, Should You Decide To Accept It

Use the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon to get the first chapter (or download the Kindle sample). Or better yet, buy the book so you can finish reading the whole thing. As soon as the characters finish with this building, they're off on yet another assignment that's even more dire. So you can take this first chapter in isolation and work with it.

REWRITE that first chapter, pulling all the dialogue off the nose, re-coding the exposition and information feed that's currently inside the dialogue into a combination of a) description, b) narrative c) internalized thoughts d) sensory impressions e) show-don't-tell imagery (you can add things and give the characters "business" with things) f) exposition.

Remember, the 4 kinds of text you find in fiction are:

a) dialogue
b) description
c) narrative
d) exposition

Ideally, each sentence or paragraph should be a smooth mixture of all of those.

Simon R. Green is one of the best writers working in this field today. I couldn't have produced a piece this exemplary for you to practice on. This will work for you as a dialogue "Chopsticks" composition to learn on only because it's so incredibly well done.

This first chapter carefully avoids going "off the nose" even when it would have been easier.

If you read his other books, (he has several dynamite series going) you'll see he does know how to do what you're just practicing here.

It doesn't matter how good you already are at dialogue, you can benefit from this exercise. I was doing this in my head as I read it, and laughing until my ribs hurt.

Your assignment is to turn this archaic rhythm&pacing exercise into a much more "modern" sounding piece. And if you can manage it, convert all the comedy into drama, or even horror, inject some Romance (not at all hard considering).

Change the genre by shifting the dialogue off the nose. Make up stuff about the characters, make them your own, just as you would if you were playing Chopsticks -- creating a unique rendition all your own just as you would if you were playing Chopsticks for the first time.

You know you have to throw away the result of this exercise -- don't plagiarize -- but play this Chopsticks composition. Render it to the limits of your abilitiy, and you will grow.

Just as if you were playing Chopsticks for the very first time, you really don't want anyone to hear or see you do this! But the results will be visible in your writing forever.

BTW: I just started reading another new Simon R. Green novel this one in his NIGHTSIDE series - gorgeously executed, solid storytelling, great work. This is one writer worth studying carefully, on the whole, not just a few pages of one novel.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Targeting the Audience

2011-12-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

I’m working on a fantasy romance novella centered around a computer role-playing game, and my first set of critiquer comments started me thinking about how we conceive of a book’s or story’s target audience. Specifically, what can we assume the audience knows prior to reading the piece of fiction? I don’t know much about computer RPGs myself. I play Dungeons and Dragons, tabletop version with dice, but my knowledge of fantasy video games comes from overhearing my husband playing them and listening to his discussions with our sons about games they’ve played. So I thought the terminology I included in the first draft of my story was the sort of thing almost anyone would be familiar with.

Specific example: “VR” for “virtual reality.” The hero and heroine are both computer geeks. In her POV, she naturally thinks “VR,” not the longer phrase. To my surprise, the commenter didn’t recognize this term. I’ve often been chided for over-explaining in my fiction, and I thought this was one point that didn’t need explanation.

In a case like this, can the writer figure that anybody who’d pick up a story whose action occurs mostly inside a computer game would already know such things? Or should an author always write for a general audience that needs explanations for anything non-mundane? Spelling everything out might annoy the target audience, but failing to spell out enough could lose potential casual readers who might otherwise enjoy the story. Nowadays, of course, nobody writes like the erudite authors of past centuries who often quoted long passages in foreign languages with no translations, on the assumption that their readers, being (of course) university-educated, wouldn’t need translations. On the other hand, explaining things most readers already know feels like talking down to them, as well as leading to unnecessary wordiness. Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint-Germain historical novels lean toward less explanation where background details are concerned. She uses period-accurate terms for clothing, etc., letting the reader infer what kind of garment is being described instead of defining it.

Yes, I know, when in doubt, we should work in bits of information in subtle ways that don’t disrupt the flow of the story. Still, is there a guiding principle on how much background one can reasonably expect of a reader? For instance, murder mysteries have different generic expectations from romance novels, and the author usually expects a reader who picks up a book in one genre or another to be at least somewhat familiar with the genre’s conventions and not balk at, say, a dead body in the library in a mystery or a “cute meet” in a romantic comedy. And I would have expected a habitual reader of fantasy to be familiar with the shade of meaning fans assign to the word “mundane” (another point that puzzled my commenter).

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Sizing Up The Competition Part 4 Futurology

2011-12-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

This is Part 4 of the series of posts titled Sizing Up The Competition.

Part 1 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html
Part 2 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html
Part 3 http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-3-romancing.html

Last week I ended off describing how I'd upgraded my household tech starting with my TV.

--------
I upgraded my household tech this year starting in January with my TV. I got a Panasonic Viera and hardwired it to my router. I got a Sony google-tv blu-ray player, and plugged the HD DVR from Cox into one HDMI plug of the TV and the SONY into another of the 3 HDMI plugs on the TV. And I hardwired the Sony to my router separately from the TV. So now my router has a wireless connected computer and 2 wired-connected computers on it plus a blu-ray google-tv device plus a Viera TV. (Viera doesn't offer google TV - this is a hugely complex market but you need to understand it to solve our master puzzle subject here, raising the prestige of Romance genre among the general public.)

The Viera offers access to Netflix (as does the Sony) and some other things I don't use, but Viera's business model is to provide more kinds of online access with time -- I haven't seen any additions this year.

----------------------
Here's part of what I learned before, during and after this upgrade, after which I upgraded my computer.

Each one of these accesses provided by Sony or Viera is a business deal, and online Web content providers are really reluctant to cut these deals.

Almost all the bizmodels of content providers doing business with Viera or Sony are "subscription based" -- like Netflix. You need to make an account with a user and password, and use that to access your netflix account which then charges your credit card for whatever you get from netflix.

That's why I got both the Sony and the Viera access for my TV. Nobody offers everything.

The Sony has google TV which uses a built in Chrome browser. Other than that browser which cruises the internet, your only access is what they provide by contract.

I can access Amazon Prime and all its streaming movies and TV shows, with the Viera TV (you do that by registering the TV's online ID number with amazon so their computer recognizes your logon.) It seemed complicated to me.

The google TV is the powerhouse device, the one you should watch carefully -- though for bizmodel reasons, google-TV is being out-competed at the moment, and not making enough money yet.

So I didn't think I needed a ROKU device or any of those headaches. I'd already ached my head enough to understand that I can see on my TV a lot of what is available on the web but not everything unless I hook up a laptop to the TV (I got the cable to do that).

GOOGLE internet access via the Sony blu-ray player hooked to the TV has certain commercial stations blacked out -- you can't use google search to get into the TV network URLs that provide access to proprietary TV shows they deliver on the web because those networks wouldn't do deals with google. I also had tech issues with the Sony blu-ray switching back and forth to Google Chrome. It crashes and has to be rebooted.

And as I mentioned above, Cox Cable has gotten into this web-delivery model to compete with Viera and Google TV.

In other words, Cox sized up the competition in the way that the big publishers have not (yet). At the moment, Cox Cable has an "app" for the iPad that lets you access a small handful of stations on the iPad, but only when it's on your home internet connection. It doesn't work on the iPhone or iPod.

So when Beck offered 2 weeks free to test out his new network, gbtv.com, I fired up my Sony and googled up gbtv.com and to my surprise I was able to WATCH A REAL-TIME WEBCAST!!! (nevermind what antics he was up to! It's irrelevant. It's the fiction delivery system that's being remade here.)

I should post here an iPod photo of me with my jaw on my belt-buckle but I was too stunned to make one.

Since Beck was selling the Roku headache, I really didn't expect the Google-TV connection to work, just the way Google tv users can't get at the USA network TV shows online.

But it did work.   The webcast is HD, but doesn't fill my 42" screen side to side -- it's a squarish patch in the middle like the non-HD channels. It's good color, movements don't blur, the picture is in every way acceptable though the sound is a bit dimmer than the cable sound. But the TV's sound tuner was able to bring the sound up to comfort levels.

The picture didn't jump and lag as streaming often does. He's carrying some commercials already, and will probably add more with time. The really big bucks he invested was in that smooth-HD picture delivery, and he has a couple of cameras and a very competent crew, but in the first week they had a number of snafus and gliches like microphones and teleprompters coming unplugged. The set he had built also cost more than the one he had on Fox, but that's a one-time investment he'll monetize.

My best information at the moment indicates it cost him about 25 million to launch this venture, but within the first week he was out-drawing Oprah. Yeah, Glenn Beck bigger than Oprah. Think about that very hard because Oprah's audience is far closer to the typical Romance readership than Glenn's. Oprah's stuck on cable, Glenn isn't. Where did that marketing consultant (read the previous parts of this series) say his contemporaries are? The web, not cable TV.

Can you write a Romance novel using ONE set? 3 or 4 characters, 1 set, webisodes. That's the toe in the door our project to elevate the perception of Romance needs.

So I'm warning you, get yourself some sort of hookup of your TV to your internet, unless of course you really prefer your computer screen or tablet screen. Another alternative is to get a really big computer monitor and hook that up to TV (lots of people doing that).

Oh, and with both the Viera and the Sony I can access YouTube directly. Do you see the POTENTIAL for Romance writers? Do you remember the coffee commercials that told a little story about neighbors borrowing coffee, getting to know each other? Study the delivery system evolution carefully.

Beck has gbtv.com rigged to deliver to iPods, iPhones, and iPads -- I downloaded the app for my iPod and it works just fine to bring up an episode of the Beck show (don't try to sit through the whole thing). Do you see the potential?

I think he'll expand the delivery modes and methods as budget allows -- he's going for the big time here, and I suspect he can become bigger than he ever was on Fox, considering how shrewd a businessman he is (again, nevermind WHAT he says, watch what he does.)

But BIG is no longer the bizmodel. CUSTOMIZED is, just like Toffler predicted.

Beck is customizing his product for a very specific, narrowly defined audience and pleasing that audience beyond their wildest expectations. It's the narrowness of his focus that causes that intense pleasure.

His audience is not our audience (mostly, anyway). But that doesn't matter. If he gets people to hook up their TV's to the internet, he's giving us all the other members of that household, isn't he?

I'm telling you, watch what this guy is doing! Pay attention to how he frames his message to his audience, figure out the business model and watch it morph over the next year.

Compare that, if you can find the time, to what Oprah is doing and how well she's succeeding at it.

Now, go back and check the beginning of Part 1 in this series on Sizing Up The Competition and tell me if I made my point. Do you understand what I'm talking about and why I'm talking about it on a blog about writing craft techniques?

Can you now write an essay on what studying Glenn Beck's business model has to do with succeeding in the future of the Romance field, all aside from the concept that if you study his content you'll have plenty of firey inspiration for rich, deep, complex themes. That inspiration would be useful only if you're not too tongue-tied by what he says to articulate the components of those themes.

Another attribute of Beck's impact on his audience is the way he slices and dices a subject. He admits he's trying to make the bits and pieces digestible for his audience. I seriously doubt that's his own work. He's got someone working for him who creates these essays or monologues. That person's thinking style (not conclusions) is the key discipline behind creating novels with complex themes so deep that the reader doesn't know the novel even has a theme.

Deep and rich thematic material is already native to your thinking. But there's a writing craft trick to taking your own rich thinking apart into its components, then restructuring the ideas so you can hang a story on them without the skeleton showing. We'll get at more of that next year.

And don't forget to sign up for notification of what the twitter founders are doing.
http://lift.do/

And I'm assuming you've investigated http://fora.tv/ and know all you want to know about Apple TV. I've heard Apple will be coming out with an internet-ready TV set, no device to attach. At this time, people use these things mostly to access movies (or old TV shows) on Amazon or Netflix which are Apple-TV's competition. Again, each of these sources owns proprietary rights in certain products (movies, TV shows, originals). Beck is producing his own original stuff you can't get anywhere else. (News shows, kids shows, comedy shows, Features, new originals by subscription only).

Netflix reported a larger drop in DVD-only subscribers than they had expected after raising prices steeply this year. They're after the "streaming" customers, but aren't really getting the growth they expected. They are on Viera and Google TV and Roku.

The bottleneck as demonstrated by comments on Beck's trying to sell Roku devices to his audience, is the technology.

The slim percentage of tech-savvy won't stand for being locked away from the functionality they desire.

They hack their cell phones to get the kind of device they want onto the network they want to subcribe to.

Here's a YouTube video of how to hack the current Apple TV (a device like Roku that you attach to your TV; you can buy the device on Amazon for about $100, but like cell phones and Google TV, it comes with "blocks" that keep you away from some information streams) in order to get to your Hulu streaming TV show account.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSSAxEYaGJQ
You do subscribe to Hulu.com, don't you? There's a free level and a Plus, or fee based level of Hulu subscription.

Hulu links with the Roku device -- so you can indeed get to your Hulu que via Roku and watch your shows on your TV without cable or satellite subscription. But, you see, the Roku/Hulu connection is a "deal" they make behind the scenes, and in order to get Hulu on Roku, you have to subscribe to Hulu Plus, which costs a continuing fee.

Here's a page where you can see all the devices that can connect you to Hulu, including Apple.

http://www.hulu.com/plus/devices?src=homepage-roku

But it doesn't include my Viera Panasonic TV or my Sony/Google-TV.

This is so reminiscent of the beginnings of AOL when it was a dial-up service with local numbers everywhere, but once you got online, all you could access was items AOL itself provided to you, not the whole internet that was outside AOL's sandbox.

Now, remember the question we started with, a deep, far-reaching philosophical question that can generate limitless numbers of rich, complex themes to hang a Romance on:

It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality. OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.

The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature. Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most.

Is this format/contract game of keep-away and the violent fighting back (hacking your this to make it do that) an example of human sexuality properly expressing itself in competition to the point of annihilation of another group's (corporation's) physical resources so its own progeny will survive and proliferate?

Wars, throughout primate history, have centered on resources such as water, food, forests, then minerals like copper, iron, tin, finally oil. Is information the next resource to trigger wars?

Have you been following the Middle East conflicts at all? Do you know that the Israeli/Palestinian border conflict over the "West Bank" is about water aquifers? If the Palestinians win, Israel hasn't enough water to support it's population and they die or leave. If the Israelis win, Israel has the water and the Palestinians don't. If they try to co-exist in the same area, they end up killing each other. Is that human nature that can't be changed, or a problem to be solved by Love (as in Love Conquers All)?

"Water" is a wonderful symbol for "fiction" or "entertainment." Or even for "information."

"Water" is a symbol for emotion, and fiction or entertainment both deliver an emotional charge. Laughter is often proved to be "the best medicine" -- and it's an entertainment commodity.

"Information" is also a "water" symbol because getting information produces the satisfaction of curiosity, an emotion.

So these "proprietary devices" which limit your access to this or that stream of fiction, entertainment, or information, are an opening gambit in hostilities against the consumer -- and the answer is to hack the device and make it deliver what you want from it. The counterstrike will be more hack-proof devices, or escalating legal penalties -- or some hostile regulation that requires companies to give away their product instead of getting paid for it.

It's "White Collar" violence (like the TV Show White Collar instead of, for example, the TV show Alphas or Burn Notice) but it's definitely a violence of a kind, a sublimated violence.

The Business World and the world of Games reflect each other. People say business is based on Football, but I wonder if Business and Football are both rooted in that zero-sum-game competition for water, food, forests, etc: the competition for the means for survival of me, mine, and my progeny.

The Romance writer knows the power of raw, violent sex scenes. There is something very primal there. But is that primate-primal or Human-Love-Primal? Or is one dependent on the other?

Questions like that lead to "rich, deep, thematic structures" as you apply "show don't tell" to them.

According to that marketing guru's consultant I pointed you to earlier in this Sizing Up The Competition series, the internet and the Web have significantly changed how younger people assess the threat of another person - how they size up the competition.

At the same time, there's been a cognitive shift away from using the mental shortcuts our ancestors always relied on to identify another human as a threat - race, color, village of origin, or just plain stranger. That's a survival shortcut, kill first ask questions later.

You, as a Romance writer in SFR or PNR or any sub-genre, must write for the children of the current twenty-somethings, using that rapidly changing method of sizing up the competition, of identifying and nullifying threats.

To understand them better than they understand themselves, you need to experience their interface with the technological platform on which they are building tools to assess or nullify threats.

That's why I'm talking about Roku and Hulu and Amazon Prime and Apple TV and Netflix and this next venture by the founders of twitter lift.do

These ventures and a half a dozen others I've encountered (maybe more than that) are all duking it out for the direct channel to you, the potential subscriber.

One of them will be willing to carry a dramatic product of yours (a story in pictures, video, screenplay) to their subscribers.

But so far none of them reach "everybody" - not even Facebook! People get leery and shy away.

So we look at this field and we see "competition" to the level of escalating white-collar violence. But are we really seeing something else? Is this actually not competition at all but rather Customization of the sort Alvin Toffler described in his non-fiction book Future Shock?

Is it delivery-systems competing for audiences? Or is it audiences competing for delivery systems?

Are audiences competing against each other for the scarce resource of fiction-delivery or information-delivery?

That gbtv.com thing I talked about delivers video of Glenn Beck sitting before a big microphone doing his RADIO show. Lots of "radio" shows these days do a video posted to the web which consists of the talk show host talking into a (super-huge) microphone. You even see such "radio" on TV, (Imus In The Morning for example).

Why is Beck joining these people, web/podcasting an image of himself (and others in the room) doing a radio broadcast, webcast?

Well, it's drawing an audience WATCHING him talk on the radio.

Why? Whywhywhy? Is it his content?

It doesn't seem so to me because I've recently seen a big increase in the number of podcasts and videos of exactly this same format of radio show on a huge variety of subjects including talk shows about books.

Here's one source created by a friend of mine, Lillian Caldwell:
    http://www.internetvoicesradio.com

That's a web-radio station she started but it's undergone a number of name and URL changes, tech upgrades, proliferation of shows MC'd by different people, and an ever growing number of "hits" or downloads or life streaming listeners. The focus is on talk about books, author interviews, and listener interactions.

Currently, the statistics stand like this:

Total listener base is 760,000. Up 200,000 since 2010. The station receives 34,000 downloads per day. 196 countries listen to the station on a daily basis. Youngest listener is 13. Oldest listener is 97.

And it delivers a quality product much appreciated by the listeners, creating growing fame. The radio station was invited by the 2011 International Miami Book Festival in late November to do remote streaming & interviewing of their authors, publishers, & agents, and other activities going on. PWRTALK (or Power Talk -- one of the newest names of this endeavor) is the only Internet talk radio station invited.

Passionate World Radio, Inc. is another way this same endeavor is known. That name changing happens because as it grows, it needs more succinct URLs and references. The work Lillian Caldwell has been doing has been gaining prestige.

Lillian was in Miami November 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, & 21st. for the Festival, and they also invited her to participate with the delegation from China, take part in their Comic & Graphic Novel Section, and with their youth group. She's took an intern to work with her crew which includes a videographer plus one other host from Washington, DC to help interview. Plans included an interview with Al Gore as well.

If you have a published book and would want to be interviewed on this web-radio station, email     LSaraCauldwell@gmail.com

Somehow radio - especially via the web now - has burgeoned, and the most popular shows are talk-shows, information shows, discussion and opinion shows that consist not of actors telling a story but of a few people sitting before over-sized microphones doing a words-only presentation.

What do the people doing discussion table video podcasts know that we don't know?

They are usually start-up entrepreneurs -- not well funded like Beck -- who enter the fray of massive competition and painstakingly gather an audience, customizing their product to the audience rather than trying to be all things to all people.

But they compete for audience-share, for advertising revenue, and try to create a viable business in a field that's changing as fast as the 20-somethings become replaced by the former teens.

Study this roiling turmoil of shifting delivery system channels carefully. Study the multimillion dollar start-ups and the $200 start-ups. Study the few-thousand-dollar a year operations.

As the marketer's consultant pointed out, young people are assessing threats in new ways, using new tools, drawing new conclusions.

Many of these twenty-somethings don't own a television set, a landline telephone, or cable or satellite service and have no ambition to ever do so. The significance of that has not been adequately assessed by the traditional publishers.

I suggest you assess it.

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

If you're the canary, you stalk that tiger.

Wellll -- so I talked myself into it writing this and bought a Roku. It displays the Beck show FULL SCREEN on my HD TV. Full screen, not a patch in the middle of the screen. It also has a few channels of offerings the other services don't have. It has a channel that offers low-budget amateur films, Vimeo, which doesn't require another subscription as Beck's GBTV.COM does. Vimeo may be on the other services too, but I didn't notice it. It has a classical opera/symphony channel. You just buy the Roku ($50-$100). You don't pay a subscription to use the Roku, but still Netflix and the others all require a subscription which you sign up for and activate on your computer, then go to your TV and enter a code into the Roku connection.

The competition in this biz is cut-throat and ferocious - more tiger than canary. Very hungry tiger.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Announcing the SFR Holiday Blitz Winners

2011-12-18T04:57:00.000-05:00

Congratulations to the winners of the great reads offered on this (alien romances) blog. They are, in no particular order:
Anna

Peta

Andrea

Ayla

Winners, if your profile does not link to an email address (Peta, Ayla) please post a comment marked PRIVATE and write in your email address. All comments on this blog are moderated and your address will not show up.

Thank you to everyone who entered, and good luck with the other contests in the SFR Holiday event.

Colonizing Other Planets

2011-12-15T09:00:00.001-05:00

In the December LOCUS, author Charles Stross pours ice water on a well-established SF trope, extraterrestrial colonization. In his view, colonization (as opposed to simple exploration) of other planets is almost impossible. After a comment about the lethal qualities of even the terrestrial environment for most of Earth’s history, he remarks, “Even now, if you dropped an unprotected human on Earth in a random location, then 90% of them would die. This is because you will have dropped them on an ice cap, or in the ocean. Only about 10% of our planet’s surface area in the current epoch is habitable—even with protective clothing, equipment, and techniques.” I’m reminded of the conversation in Heinlein’s FARMER IN THE SKY where the young narrator tells his father about skeptics who maintain that Ganymede shouldn’t be colonized because it’s not a natural habitat for human beings. His father replies that neither is Los Angeles. Without advanced technology, southern California would support only a tiny fraction of its present population.

Stross denies the common fictional assumption that a colony on another planet could support human life, even in an enclosed habitat, with only a source of oxygen and a way of growing food. He highlights the fact that the micronutrients in the plants and animals we eat depend on the nourishment those organisms absorb from the life forms they consume, and so on all the way down the food chain. To ensure our long-term survival, we couldn’t just raise a select group of plant and animal species in a greenhouse; we’d have to bring along their entire ecosystem. We don’t know enough about the micronutrients we need for life to take short cuts. He contrasts biosphere experiments that have run for a year or less with the demands of supporting a civilization for centuries.

I’d never thought of the colonization problem in these terms. Here’s one of his essays on the topic, although most of it deals with the sheer difficulty of getting people to habitable planets in any reasonable time span. There are lots of interesting comments below his post:

High Frontier Redux

What do you think? Is Stross’s pessimism justified?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Sizing Up The Competition Part 3 Romancing The Web

2011-12-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

As you can see, from most of my blog entries here, but especially Parts 1 & 2 of this Sizing Up The Competition series:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/12/sizing-up-competition-part-2-winning.html

...I obviously spend a lot of time thinking about Love and Romance and how they relate to each other. One place I study this relationship is on Amazon, among the reader commentaries.

On amazon, I see a generational divide gaping wider.

Now, please remember the essence of the science fiction/fantasy fan is the retention of the Child-like Sense of Wonder far into adulthood. That's CHILD-LIKE not childish. It's a canary attitude. Remember the canary from part 1 of this "Sizing up the Competition" series.

So we can't really parse this readership by age-group alone. The science fiction/Paranormal Romance reader can be any age -- and each age contains all the other ages.

Many SF/F fans are extremely mature even as pre-teens, and many middle aged fans love to read YA novels. They may not get the same charge out of it that they once did, but from an older perspective they get a different, equally potent, affirmation of life.

That demographic fact has confounded the major publishers ever since I can remember. As far as I can tell, they're more confounded now than ever, and amazon is just making it worse for them. Do read that "sleeping with the enemy" blog I linked in a previous part -- here it is again:.

http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html

On the other hand, there is a definite shift in the way huge numbers of people look at the world, at each other, and at the relationship among people.

Here is a blog entry that defines the generation gap in terms of age and experience of Relationship.

This marketer, John Carlton, asked a young friend how young people size each other up these days -- what they look at among a person's possessions and connections, their choices on how to spend money, and their preferences in music, to tell whether to establish a relationship with that person.

http://www.john-carlton.com/2011/09/cross-cultural-exam-9-boomer-v-xer-with-prize/?link1

The generational difference that the young consultant pinpointed was simply being "at home" on the web.

The internet, more even than the cell phone and texting, has caused a major shift in how people evaluate each other.

Your online footprint reveals as much, maybe more, about you as was once revealed by your book shelves and record collection.

I noted that in sizing people up before entering a relationship, there was little emphasis on how a person dresses, their physical attractiveness or ethnicity.

Now, the marketer was after a general impression, but here we're focused more on how people size up another person with respect to possible romantic, love-and-marriage, relationships and/or sexual potential.

"First impressions are lasting" as they say (which is very true) and apparently today's first impression is your web-presence, what sites you interact on, and who you "friend" or connect with in circles.

The consultant pointed out that the world has changed in such a way that young people don't have what I call a "universe of discourse" in common now. There are no particular songs or singers that "everyone who is anyone" follows. There are no books or authors that everyone knows. There's just nothing that "everyone" has in common to create an "everyone."

As I've pointed out in previous posts this lack of the common experience is a stealthy but major change that few are taking seriously enough.

I've been thinking that a lot of this fragmentation is not so much due just to the Web or Cable TV with hundreds of channels, plus games. I've begun to suspect it's simply a result of population growth. I recall a statistic from a study of Twitter that indicated that humans just can't solidify associations with more than about 1,000 people, and even that's a stretch. 500 or so is a real inflection point.

The world of 3-TV-networks that don't even broadcast all night, so that "everyone" watches one of the 3 eight-o'clock shows, is gone. Long ago, studies of rush-hour highway traffic and the cost of building more lanes or more roads caused businesses to "stagger" work hours so people don't all hit the road at the same minute. Even so, we still waste gas and health on traffic jams. Maybe that's just population growth.

Our entire economic system depends for its health on "growth" -- if the economy doesn't "grow" we are in dire straits. Why is that? Are we alligators or sharks that we never stop growing until we die? Statistics indicate the number of new jobs that must be created because of the number of new people entering the workforce, and so the economy must grow or there won't be enough jobs for everyone. But now we've reached an inflection point where the baby-boomers are retiring. Will the workforce shrink rather than grow despite the number of young people looking for jobs? Has our population (in the USA) topped out at 308,745,538 (census bureau as of 2010)?

That's double 1950's statistic of 1950 152,271,417

Here's a portrait of 1964 which I assembled while working on my Memoirs for a publisher who wants the book sooner rather than later.

Color television makes its way into U.S. homes.
April 24, 1964, Socorro UFO sighting by a Policeman makes folks wonder anew. Forgotten Roswell incident resurrected.
India Mourning Nehru, 74, Dead of a Heart Attack
June 1964 Civil Rights Bill Passed, 73-27
July 1964 Ranger Takes Close-Up Moon Photos gaining data on Landing Site for Man
Gal of gas costs 30 cents
USA Pop 191,888,791 (that's from a website http://www.npg.org/facts/us_historical_pops.htm )
More has changed than just the number of people crammed into the same USA borders. We now import about 60% of our food supply (I heard that on TV last year; it might not be accurate now).

Before World War II, we were net exporters of food and energy. When war hit, we invented nylon and other synthetics because we couldn't import enough rubber to field our war vehicles with tires and gaskets and provide silk stockings for the women who marched out to fill in the work force as the men left to be grunts for the military. So women wore nylons (with seams up the back and garter belts).

We invented synthetics (mostly made from our abundant oil) because the natural sources of materials couldn't keep up with demand. Then the baby boomer population continued to increase demand, so more synthetic materials (plastics in particular!) became marketable to fill the demand for buttons (formerly made of ivory or bone).

It's all about competition, the Tiger and the Canary. Tigers and Canaries are two different species, one living on the ground the other in the trees. They could get along fine. We humans are all one species and we all want the exact same living space, climate, easy abundant food and energy -- and materials for satin sheets and sexy clothing. And we're competing hard for jobs and mates!

Is the rise of infidelity (if there is a rise) due to that competition for a mate in close quarters, but in a teaming mass of people where it's hard to tell one from another? Is Romance being killed off by sexuality? If so, why? If not, why? (lots of novels in those essay questions)

Now go to imdb.com and look up the popular films from the 1960's, check out the way Romance was portrayed. See if you can find sales statistics and box office statistics on the Romance genre. And all the while, takes notes for your next novel.

The internet and the web 2.0 interactivity that I've discussed many times here is the real dividing line not just in the skills people bring to the workplace, not just in how people buy books or consume film and TV, but in how people actually choose a mate.

And I don't mean computerized dating services. As this young marketing consultant pointed out, people raised with Facebook and Twitter, with blogs and texting, and social networking aggregators, with "feeds" and google, look at each other differently.

That difference has to be affecting what seems plausible in a romantic encounter.

I wrote about the now classic film You've Got Mail here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/04/youve-got-mail-1998-award-winning-film.html

And there's more to come. In fact, it's happening as you read this. There is an explosion of creativity being unleashed by the web, connecting people, engaging people in cooperative endeavors during which they "hook up" one way or another.

The co-founders of twitter want to back a new web-based venture that they envision, according to an interview with them I saw on television during Worldcon 2011, will connect people in new ways that twitter could not.

Here's where to sign up to be notified when they launch this thing -- which they aren't discussing yet in detail.

http://lift.do/

Note that it's not a "dot-com" URL.

The biggest surge of life-altering, perception-altering change that I'm seeing now is in the online video community.

YouTube was the ground-breaker, like twitter, and it's still going big time. The most popular videos now approach professional quality production.

On twitter, and LinkedIn, and other social networks I've found a large number of folks "crowd-sourcing" the financing for low budget films. Yes, I know you know about all that, but the significance of this development is much bigger than anyone has guessed.

The significance for the romance and science fiction market is huge. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and the young people who have grown up with this new method of assessing new associates from afar are the ones poised to exploit this opportunity.

There's a new application to all this as well. For five or even ten years there has been a growing presence on the web of video presentations. Now, though, we are seeing the launch of professional scale ventures using the web as a platform.

The 2008 and 2010 election cycles saw web-sourcing of funding and Facebook page "like" counts for candidates burgeoning. I expect the 2012 cycle will find the web even more significant. Already, the primary candidates are dueling on YouTube.

Every product imaginable (including novels) are now pitched with short YouTube video advertisements. They're on every commercial page you visit - just roll your mouse over and a little video pops up.

But here's the big development of major significance to Romance writers, especially those just starting out and enthusiastically mixing other genres into Romance.

WEB-BASED-NETWORKS.

Not just little videos or advertisements, not just a movie or TV type Star Trek episode. I'm talking about the genesis of an entire "network" -- or maybe "station" or "channel" -- but I think it's going to become a network with lots of channels carrying the network shows and presenting "local" shows.

I'm talking about gbtv.com -- yeah, the Glenn Beck exclusive subscription only channel.

Before you start jumping around and screaming, take a deep breath and dismiss the nature of the content from your mind.

We're business people here, and we're talking business model in a world where the 1964 writer's business model has collapsed (maybe because of population growth; maybe not). Nobody missed the collapse of Borders bookstore chain this year, did they? You've all bought a Kindle Fire or Color Nook? Now Amazon Prime (film/TV/fast-delivery) has added a free!!! ebook borrowing opportunity. Publishers have to opt-in and get an advertisement or two tossed into the package -- and authors get paid if their book is borrowed -- but free for an annual fee for Prime. Think business model, competition, and don't forget to think mating. Mating spawns new growth.

Publishing is poof-gone! The traditional publishers are dinosaurs and, judging by the major, pro-active discontent among widely published authors, the publishers are finally getting the message.

Amazon's growth, proliferation into publishing, diversification, and international footprint have made that insignificant little online bookstore called Amazon the worst enemy and darkest nightmare of Manhattan's paper-based establishment.

Think again about that change in the way younger people assess others for potential relationships. Amazon allows you to "share" wishlists and purchases, gossip in forums, every social tool there is!

Think hard about that generation gap and the economic woes as the baby boomers retire. The baby boomers didn't grow up on the web, they grew up with it. Heck, they invented it.

A new generation is finding uses for the Web that shatter the very foundations of society, maybe our entire civilization.

"When you have a tiger by the tail, there's only one thing to do. Swarm aboard and ride it."

That's true, even if you're a canary.

Almost at the same time that Glenn Beck launched his gbtv.com venture (it's not only his show; he's doing children's programming, comedy, and a huge charity venture too!) the Oprah Winfrey cable network lost some major stars and reported dismal quarterly results. Beck now has a bigger audience that Oprah. When the goosebumps that idea gave you subside, think hard about what it means in terms of the mating game and competition.

Cable TV in general has been falling off drastically in the number of viewers who watch any given show. Cox Cable now provides (for no additional cost) access via the web for subscribers to watch TV episodes and movies -- pretty much trying to compete with Amazon Prime streaming TV, but only some content is available via the web.

Now think about the 16 year old's "Coming Out Party" from the Steampunk/Victorian era. Girls have traditionally been "marketed" on the "marriage market" and competition has always been fierce.

Re-read that young marketing consultant's comments. People who live on the web, just don't have any given piece of fiction or music in common -- there's too much, the audiences have scattered. Yet marketers continue to try to use "social networking" to get these loosely interlaced circles to tell each other about products, to create or unify a market.

The "Christian Mingle" online dating service advertises they gained more than a million subscribers last year.

Did you see Microsoft unveiling their Windows 8 platform, designed to compete with touchscreen Apple devices such as iPod, iPhone and iPad? It makes your desktop more like your hand-held. The iPhone 5 is reputed to be designed for a larger screen. Consumer's Reports feature article on Cell Phones indicated none of them are good at voice. Texting and Data is how people communicate now.

Did you see how schools are equiping kids with iPads? Schools are raising money for this technology upgrade by asking kids to solicit donations from friends and relatives.

You're a writer. Your task in this life is to connect the dots and make a picture of the world for your readers. In SF or Paranormal Romance, you need a dash of futurology. Extrapolate where these trends are going next. Keep an eye on that population statistic.

Connect the dots I've highlighted in these 3 parts of Sizing Up The Competition.

There are lots of dots, and no two writers will make the same connections, display the same picture.

Broadcast networks are GONE. Blockbuster Video is GONE. Borders bookstore chain is GONE. Large scale conglomerate-owned publishers are GONE or going. Mass market is GONE, sales shrinking while e-books sales grow (and I haven't even talked about audiobooks, which my novels are now entering).

Listen to that marketer's consultant -- young people will not now and probably never will, form a "mass" of anything.

Mass production may be GONE as Toffler predicted. We are moving to customized production, not mass production -- though the statistics don't show that yet. If you wait until they show it to write your novel, you'll be too late!

Mass EMPLOYMENT is likewise a dinosaur. This generation coming out of college this year is the second generation headed for a life where "career" is not "get a job, keep it, retire." This is a generation of job-hoppers raised by job-hoppers and ladder-climbers, and it will become the "self-employed" generation.

Remember "climbing the corporate ladder" meant moving your family from place to place for 20 years, so your kids had no continuity of associates, schools, or even state-requirements for graduation from high school. Those corporate kids are now raising kids.

So we have a second rootless generation now getting set to raise a generation that lives on the Web!

What do you want to bet "marrying the boy next door" will become "marrying my best Facebook bud?"

Homeschooled kids best friends are web-acquaintances -- oh, yeah, and iPhone now makes facetalk a generally available way to associate, though the sound isn't so good.

If you are going to write Romance with rich, deep, complex themes so that the novels you produce become cross-generation classics that last a hundred years and gain vast respect among non-Romance readers -- then you must write for this next rootless generation of Web-buddies, and for the kids they will raise, and for the next generation those kids will raise.

You must make the past of the Victorian era, the 1930's and the 1960's etc accessible, comprehensible, and respectable to those raised in the 21st century.

Even if you wrote such a masterpiece, or a series of them, how would you reach this fragmented generation?

Observe what happens with Glenn Beck's gbtv.com venture -- NOT the content, the business model. He's leaving Manhattan for the lower-tax, more business friendly Texas. Could it be Manhattan is too expensive for web-TV? Could that be the deathnell of the BIG CITY living-model?

Watch what works, what doesn't, what they're copying, what they're emulating, and how they make money at it. Especially watch where they advertise and how much they spend on that.

Watch what happens to Oprah's cable venture, and figure out why.

Watch for things like this:
http://webbeat.tv/

I met one of the fellows behind that one on Facebook through the actor who's reading the Sime~Gen novels for audible.com production -- whom I met on twitter. It's ALL social networking, folks!

Here's what I'm seeing right now.

Beck beat the drum on his Web TV launch for months, with a subscriber price of $100/year (about the same as Amazon Prime) for access to all he presents. ($50 for about half what he's doing online).

But as the launch date approached, all of a sudden he started offering a gadget to connect your TV to his show via the internet -- assuming you have high speed internet at home.

http://web.gbtv.com/roku/index.jsp -- he's pitching the Roku device.

I tried it. It's the same kind of deal as google-TV or Viera -- you see a screen full of little squares with logos of subscription services, click from your remote control, find a list of programs offered by that subscription service. Some are free with ads, some cost an additional annual fee (most all require a signup routine using a computer or suffering through a signup using the half-assed remote control). Netflix, as you've all heard, raised their fee and lost subscribers. Now it's tottering on the stock market. Find out where those subscribers went. (Amazon Prime is one possibility, Roku another, Hulu is on most of the services that Netflix is on). They're all "competing for a mate" now!

If you read the comments on the roku installation somewhere on that website, you'll see not everyone can master it, make it work -- a lot of people were disgusted with the tricky-tech. I didn't like it, but it only took me about an hour to make it work. It produces good HD, better than Sony's service.

I'm not ready to drop cable TV yet, but I can see the economic squeeze making people choose, and they will choose to maintain an internet connection rather than both TV and internet, if they must.

You have to understand the desperate fervor among Beck's followers. They are starving for more of the kind of show he put on Fox at 5PM eastern -- so he's now doing 2-hours instead of 1 hour, and he's starting at 5PM eastern, complete with studio audience, replicating the show that drew the largest cable audience and made everyone who follows audience-share statistics panic (which is why they attacked him, not really for his content, but because people listened to that content in preference to other advertising supported content -- business model, remember?)

So even this audience of younger people and older people who just can't cut the tech of installing Roku, want this content, but were not subscribing in sufficient numbers for computer-only apparently. (or why would he offer a headache like Roku?) Sales statistics last Christmas were showing "flatscreen tv" as a big item moving briskly and most of them have a plug to connect you to the internet via your household router.

I upgraded my household tech this year starting in January with my TV. I got a Panasonic Viera and hardwired it to my router (it's now on wireless to my router). I got a Sony google-tv blu-ray player, and plugged the HD DVR from Cox into one HDMI plug of the TV and the SONY into another of the 3 HDMI plugs on the TV. And I hardwired the Sony to my router separately from the TV. So now my router has a wireless connected computer and 2 wired-connected computers on it plus a blu-ray google-tv device plus a Viera TV. (Viera doesn't offer google TV - this is a hugely complex market but you need to understand it to solve our master puzzle subject here, raising the prestige of Romance genre among the general public.)

I now have a Roku plugged into the "Game" plug for my TV. This is called market-research for a reason -- you have to look at markets and figure out what flies where.

The Viera offers access to Netflix (as does the Sony and Roku) and some other things I don't use, but Viera's business model is to provide more kinds of online access with time -- I haven't seen any additions this year. Roku has a variety of offerings I don't see elsewhere.

Next week we'll explore the fragmentation of the "audience" and the way content providers (like you, the writer) are spinning in bewilderment but boldly and heroically chasing that audience, or attracting new audiences, out-building or maybe out-competing their forebears.

The Fiction Delivery System has changed.

You must understand those changes to take advantage of them to deliver your stories to your specific audience.

But better yet would be to anticipate (as in the science fiction writer's mainstay, futurology) the future changes, so you can position your fiction where it can't be missed by the evolving system.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Alien Romances Is In The SFR Holiday Blitz

2011-12-11T12:01:00.051-05:00

Once again, the alien romances blog supports The Galaxy Express (.net) Science Fiction Romance
Holiday event which encourages lovers of science fiction romance to revisit favorite sites and discover new sites and authors in the genre who might be new to them.

This year, the emphasis is on e-books, and anyone who leaves a comment on any participating site has the change to win free science fiction romance e-books (choice of format).

Please note (and this is a personal comment), no one is going to win the copyright of the e-books. What is on offer, unless any author personally tells you otherwise, is a license to read the e-book.

HOW TO ENTER

Entering is free and easy: Just leave a comment here, and on every other blog that is participating.
By leaving a comment here, you’ll be entered for a chance to win one (1) of the ebooks seen here.
Then visit the other participating blogs, which are listed below for your convenience.
The deadline to enter (by leaving a comment) is midnight at EST on Friday, December 16, 2011.

Winners can choose from the following formats: PDF, Mobi, or ePub unless otherwise stated.

Event details:

*The contest will start at 3:00 pm EST on Sunday, December 11, 2011.
It will end at midnight EST on Friday, December 16, 2011.

*After the contest ends, each blog host will pick the winners—1 winner per book.
Each blog will announce the winners for their blog by Monday, December 19, 2011.
Winners will provide their emails to the blog host, who will contact the authors who will then distribute their prize to their winner.

*Winners can choose from the following formats: PDF, Mobi, or ePub except where otherwise stated.

E-book prizes being offered (1 randomly chosen winner per e-book) on this blog:

Hero and Border Dispute (Kindle format only) - Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Sealed in Blood (PDF format only) - Margaret L. Carter

The Slipstream Con (PDF, Mobi, ePub) - S. Reesa Herberth & Michelle Moore

The Limit of Desire (PDF, Mobi, ePub) – Nico Rosso

Participating blogs to visit, and comment on for a chance to win e-books.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/

http://contactinfinitefutures.wordpress.co m/

http://www.loveromancepassion.com/

http://sfrcontests.blogspot.com/ SFR Brigade

Smart Girls Love SciFi
Smart Girls Love SciFi & Paranormal Romance

http://spacefreighters.blogspot.com/

http://www.thegalaxyexpress.net/

http://vvb32reads.blogspot.com/

Shadow Work

2011-12-08T09:00:00.000-05:00

According to this article, “shadow work” is unpaid, unrecognized labor that makes it possible for society to function:

Shadow Work

Examples: The “second shift,” as the chores around the house typically done by women have been called. The time required to commute to one’s paying job. The trend toward making the customer do the tasks traditionally performed by staff. We’ve been pumping our own gas and getting cash from ATMs for decades. Now the frequency of such practices as self-checkout in grocery stores is increasing. The article makes the cogent comment that “self-service” really means “no service.”

Particularly interesting from an SF viewpoint is the idea that instead of technology liberating us from work, as so many robot stories have predicted, our technology is forcing more work on us (without increasing our income).

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Sizing Up The Competition Part 2 Winning A Mate

2011-12-06T11:00:00.000-05:00

Last week

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/sizing-up-competition-part-1-tigress.html

we ended off with this observation:

It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality. OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.

The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature. Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most.

This is exactly the sort of science-philosophy that science fiction (and by extension science fiction romance) exists to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate about.

But as we noted last week, we must practice the stagecraft adage Don't speak for the moment, let the moment speak for itself.

If you have characters expounding philosophy or beating their political drums at each other, baring their metaphorical fangs (or real ones), the reader will not be entertained.

The writer of science fiction or Paranormal Romance is the one who has to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate. The reader should not be aware that this happened offstage. The writer sets up a "moment" and then just stands silently and lets that "moment" speak to the reader who never knows all the work that went into defining and constructing that moment.

It is up to the writers of Romance novels to ask these difficult and unsavory questions -- not to find answers, but to engage readers in thinking and feeling, aspiring and finding peace, creating the Happily Ever After ending, the HEA.

So here's a question:

If this "violence-is-inherent" thesis about human nature and human reproduction is true for humans, does that mean it necessarily must be true for any non-humans we might come across in this galaxy -- or another galaxy?

Would this thesis hold true across time-lines or across "universes?" Would human ghosts exhibit the same tendency toward competition, violence, winning? Think paranormal romance.

What would humans who do not function along the lines of competition/winning/violence create in the way of civilization?

What would happen if one of "us" met one of "them?"

Perhaps "we" arose from such a cross-fertilization? Way back?

If we humans contain all the animal attributes of the creatures behind us on the evolutionary ladder, then we contain the canary as well as the tiger, don't we? How do they get along together?

It's hard to imagine Darwin's thesis holding validity without the concept of competing for mates, with the best and the strongest winning.

The drive to grow up strong, and the need to win at everything, really does seem to function as a mating game dynamic. But how much of that is cultural and how much inherent?

Is "winning a mate" actually related in any way to Romance? Or is "winning" antithetical to "romance?"

Is "winning a mate" about the tiger while Romance is about the canary?

Could that be the source of the Battle of the Sexes?

I recently read some reviews on amazon of modern Fantasy novels published by the Big 6 publishers mentioned in the blog article I sited in Part 1 last week:

http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html

These recent novels I've read have become heavily laced with violence (the kickass heroine falls in love). But they are marketed to romance readers.

Some veteran romance readers balk at the hatred and violence portrayed as a vision of the world through the first-person heroine's eyes.

I'm not talking about just one book here; there's a trend afoot though you may not have noticed it yet. I'm the canary in the coal mine when it comes to trends in fiction!

Some modern romance readers are disappointed at the lack of, or at the low-quality of, the sex scenes.

The consensus seemed to me to lean in the direction of "violence/hatred and Romance don't mix."

Hatred and the resultant savage violence somehow spoil the Romance mood (which is not news to me!)

But apparently there are some editors at the big publishing houses for whom the violence fulfills the Romance in some way, or their sales numbers are telling them that a growing segment of their customers look for the dark, ugly portrayals amidst the Romance.

We can all relate to the idea that the tiger-in-human-form is sexy. But is he sexy covered in the blood of the canary?

I have long had a screeching complaint against film makers, TV shows, and publishers for the way they present only what I term "upside down" or "inside out" fictional structures.

You can see this very clearly today in TV shows. The one that hit me between the eyes recently is a lovely show titled THE GLADES, about a detective relocated to Florida, who is ridiculously good at solving murders.

The reason I watch THE GLADES is the mixed-up love-story/romance between the detective and a nurse who wants to be a doctor. Her husband was in prison, and she was raising her kid alone working as a nurse, taking courses to become a doctor. The detective mentors the kid, really likes the boy just for his personality, falls in love (resisting all the way) with the mother, and the father gets out of prison. Trouble ensues, and now the story is progressing (well, I hope it'll return).

But this is also the reason I watch several other shows of that sort. I endure the murders and ugly side of human nature dealt with in order to follow the Romance.

But the Romance is always frustratingly secondary. The relationships or love story are just complications, while much more air time is spent on chase scenes, fight scenes, night club scenes, bleeding people, dead people, filthy alleys. Those are the "moments" left to "speak" to us.

Now, it's good to have some of that "reality" jazz for artistic contrast, for thematic high relief, and I always have that dimension in the stuff I write. But for me, as writer or reader, all that stuff is background.

The important thing is Love Conquers All, and the arduous path to the Happily Ever After (and yes, I do sometimes show how many novels worth of drama and how many lifetimes a soul must live to achieve that Happily Ever After, but it's the main point of the whole thing.)

In the modern TV show formula, (as in times past), the main point is the ugly death, the more violence the better, and love is just a complication.

You can find no better lesson in the difference between foreground and background than in studying the TV series (say ALPHAS for example) vs. a really nice Romance.

One of the reasons I like the TV Series WHITE COLLAR so much is that it is depicting the converging pathways of the life of crime vs. the life of a solid marriage. WHITE COLLAR is showing us the transformation of a fine upstanding criminal into a champion of law and order. Or maybe that's not the gameplan that the producers will eventually pursue. It depends on the ratings.

Fascinatingly, this transformation of character (called in screenwriting "arc") is from criminal to cop, while in Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series we're watching the transformation of a cop into a criminal. Anita's story involves a whole lot more sex of incredible variety, a considerable amount of loyalty, lust and even affection, but not a great deal of actual Love. Without Love I can't see an HEA in her future.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Darkover 2011

2011-12-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

Over Thanksgiving weekend we attended the Darkover con, just north of Baltimore, as we have been doing for years. We got lucky with the weather, so we had a pleasant drive each way and didn’t shiver on the short walks between parking lot and hotel. The hotel had some problems this year. The elevator nearest our room didn’t work all weekend, the restaurant ran out of major food groups (notably shrimp and pasta) and never got restocked, and I heard outraged comments that the bar was closed for several hours Saturday afternoon. The con itself, though, was great, as always.

I appeared on two panels: One on the recent trends in vampire fiction and the other on the “two poles of SF,” Pygmalion and Frankenstein and “where are we now?” We all puzzled a bit over where that topic was supposed to go! The consensus emerged that we were meant to talk about whether technology is seen as good or bad, beneficial or threatening, in current literature. Not surprisingly, the panel came up with examples of both attitudes in today’s SF and fantasy.

I also participated in my first Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading. Broad Universe exists to promote speculative fiction by women. At a Rapid Fire Reading, several members get the chance to read from their works for less than ten minutes each. It was a fun experience, which I hope will be repeated at future Darkovers.

Guests of honor were Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner. I was thrilled to be able to get a new book by Sherman, THE FREEDOM MAZE. Several years ago I read a preview excerpt from it in an anthology and was disappointed to find out it didn’t have a publisher scheduled at that time. Now, at last, it’s in print. Sophie, a thirteen-year-old girl in 1960 Louisiana, wishes to have an adventure and gets sent through time to 1860, where she meets her own ancestors back when the family had wealth and a sugar cane plantation. However, because she’s deeply tanned, barefoot, and scruffy looking, with no sensible account to give of herself, she’s mistaken for a mixed-blood slave sent from the home of the master’s brother in New Orleans. Gradually she adjusts to this life and makes a few friends, as the magical Creature who sent her back decrees that the adventure won’t end until she does what she came for—whatever that is. Then Things Get Worse. Fascinating story, reminiscent of Jane Yolen’s THE DEVIL’S ARITHMETIC, although less dark.

The main thing I miss at present-day Darkover (well, in addition to the Sime-Gen celebrations we had back when Jacqueline attended) is the costume contest, which they abolished because participation had fallen so low. However, with the addition of a steampunk programming track, there are lots of costumed fans wandering the halls.

And of course the Clam Chowder concert on Saturday night continues to be the major highlight, followed by a midnight singing of the Hallelujah Chorus in the hotel atrium. I make a point of getting a room overlooking the lobby so I can listen to it in my nightie.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Sizing Up The Competition: Part 1 The Tigress And The Canary

2011-11-29T11:00:00.000-05:00

Picking up on the previous topic of weaving deep, rich, complex themes for Romance Novels, I want to talk about the evolution of our fiction delivery system -- in particular, at the moment, the evolution of the e-book and web-tv (or podcasting).

It's all about cost, price, and competition. It's all about the tiny spot where the hard rubber of economics meets the even harder road of consumer demand.

This is where the business model of fiction writing and publishing actually becomes indistinguishable from the thematic substance of the work of fiction.

Consumers want their fiction-fix, but how much are they willing to pay for it? And how does a Romance writer make their fiction worth the price the Romance reader is willing to pay?

My answer: the monetary value of a piece of fiction lies inside the deep, rich complexity of the thematic structure -- of what the fiction says and shows, illustrates and iconisizes, about the meaning of life.

Here's a "show don't tell" from a famous commercial for financial services.

An elegantly dressed woman considers a china cabinet full of expensive looking pottery. She takes down a dish, turns to a table, picks up a hammer, and smashes the dish. She thoughtfully inspects the pieces, picks one out in the middle and takes off. Next scene, she's inserting the piece she extracted into a mosaic on the wall in another building. She admires the completed mosaic and the voice over tries to sell you their service.

Of all the nonsensical commercials I've seen lately, this one resonates. I can't recall what company it's for, and it didn't convince me to call their offices immediately. It just made me admire the writer for finding a show-don't-tell that is cheap to film and captivates the eye at least the first time you see it.

It's for financial services, and it's about completing your portfolio, making it make sense, making it strong and without a hole in it.

But the illustration could just as easily apply to a dating service offering a chance to complete your life.

Which is more fundamental, financial stability or a good marriage?

This commercial illustrates how the very simplest, clean, clear, short, penetrating IMAGE can open doorways into vast, dim, complex, roiling depths of philosophical muddles where the best high drama lurks.

A good novel opens with that sort of image, and ends with that sort of image. The image tells the story.

There's an adage in stagecraft that applies (remember: writing is a performing art) and that adage is "Don't speak for the moment, let the moment speak for itself."

Don't explain, don't tell, don't muddle the image or the moment with dialogue. Let the reader absorb the impact and ask themselves the question.

Does life have any meaning without Love? Without at least one experience of Romance?

I doubt it. But some people need a bit more convincing.

So we've recently been talking about sources for complex, multi-layered themes that lend themselves to Romance requirements.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/09/verisimilitude-vs-reality-part-2-master.html

And the 4 posts on Believing In Happily Ever After Plus the 3 posts on Poetic Justice.

Here's a post with the links to these prior posts in this discussion:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/10/believing-in-happily-ever-after-part-4.html

It's all about handling theme at a level that makes novels last for centuries, makes them be re-printable, re-readable, and something you would save to hand down to your children and grandchildren.

So let's consider the Tigress and the Canary.

I found this canary on talkstandards.com on an article about competing e-book formats.

http://www.talkstandards.com/canary-in-a-coal-mine-competing-e-reader-standards-herald-the-arrival-of-a-market/

We've been talking about e-books for a long time, of course, and in 2010, with Amazon's second Christmas push of the Kindle, it became clear that the e-book was a marketable commodity. In 2011 e-book sales are meeting and even topping tree-book sales. And here comes the big Christmas commerce-push again now with Kindle Fire etc etc.

Here's a blog post highlighting the kind of thinking Amazon is putting into fiction delivery:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/amazon-considers-ebook-rental-service_b37942

This is what all readers have been telling e-book publishers for at least 10 years. One of the most important things about buying a book is being able to lend it. Another, so far not addressed, is being able to trade it on the used book market for other used books. A third is the ability to collect the autograph of the author on the book, to increase its sales or sentimental value. They're working on all these problems, too! And the traditional publishers know that.

Here's a blog entry by a writer who's run into the teeth of the raging combat between tree publishers and e-publishers erupting into a lawyered-up contract dispute:

http://kianadavenportdialogues.blogspot.com/2011/08/sleeping-with-enemy-cautionary-tale.html

As with the beta vs vhs standards wars, and blu-ray vs dvd, and onwards into future proprietary rights wars, we have marketplace competition.

http://www.free-extras.com/images/bengal_tiger-8893.htm

Most tigers wouldn't necessarily bother eating something as small as a canary, but your house cat might consider it fun to play with for a while. *CHOMP*

But consider the tiger personality and the canary personality. We worry about tigers being an endagered species while we breed canaries for fun (cage birds) and profit (coal miner's warning).

Tigers would eat our babies (i.e. compete with us), but we worry about a world without tigers.

Canaries might not be good to eat for humans -- mostly because they're too small. But their cousins, the chicken, we eat fried on a stick.

Canaries are a food source for other things that tigers might eat.

The tiger is an icon of violence, slow, smarmy, sudden violence.

The canary is an icon of sensitivity and beauty.

A woman of a certain age, aggressively after a man (or men, really) is often called a tigress. Or maybe cougar.

Can sensitivity and beauty be agressive? Can sensitivity hunt and pounce?

The canary's food doesn't tend to fight back - though it can be hard to find.

I'm talking plot/conflict here as it integrates with theme.

If the relational structure of life on this planet that Darwin revealed is looked at from a Romance writer's point of view, (with maybe some astrology tossed in) we can see how humans, who sit on top of this evolutionary ladder, contain all the attributes of the animals lower down that ladder. That's physical and psychological attributes.

However we got this way, we contain all life on this planet within us.

Every human is a walking habitat of microbes at war with each other for living space within us.

Many psychologists argue that such economic competition as we now see with e-book vs. tree-book is innate in humans and actually arises from or is based on sexual competition for a mate.

It can be argued that the whole animal kingdom is at war, and it's all based on sexuality. OK, it's a stretch to blame microbe-wars on sexuality since they don't have any, but still they eat each other.

The thesis is that violence is inherent in primate nature. Violence is necessary to ensure that the strongest among us mate and proliferate the most.

This is exactly the sort of science-philosophy that science fiction (and by extension science fiction romance) exists to challenge, dissect, discuss, and speculate about.

More about that in Part 2 next week. The fiction delivery system of this rapidly changing world is adapting, and in the process providing extraordinary opportunities for Romance writers to present the inspiration and vision of the Happily Ever After lifestyle to those who simply can not imagine it in any kind of reality.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Visiting the Land of Ago

2011-11-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving (in the U.S.)!

I’ve just read Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63. The narrator, Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, goes back in time to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy. The time portal to which Jake is introduced by the dying man who first discovered it, who had to return to the present when his cancer became too advanced, leads to only one point, a particular day in September 1958. No matter how long you spend in the past, only two minutes elapse in 2011. Furthermore, each use of the portal creates a “reset,” a concept I hadn’t encountered in time travel fiction before. Doesn’t matter whether the same person or a different one makes the trip; every trip erases any previous changes. (Or so they believe until the end; the truth turns out to be a little more complicated.) So when Jake travels to 1958 to spend five years preparing to fulfill his friend’s aspiration to save Kennedy, he has to start over from scratch. It’s interesting to watch King work within these conditions he has set up.

Naturally, Jake tries to blend into the past and draw as little attention to himself as possible. He fears stirring up butterfly effects that might derail Lee Harvey Oswald’s destiny in unpredictable ways. Over the years, though, Jake gradually finds himself putting down roots in the “Land of Ago” and falls in love with a woman. The only way, finally, he can preserve their relationship in the face of her suspicions about him, after she finds out he has lied about his background, is to admit the truth.

But how do you tell someone you come from the future without having her think you’re either a con man or a lunatic?

If you traveled into the past and WANTED to reveal your origin to somebody, maybe to avert a disaster by warning people, how could you prove you’re from the future?

Your first thought might be to show off a piece of futuristic technology you’ve brought along. Jake deliberately avoided bringing anything that would arouse suspicion, so he couldn’t do that. Besides, flashy tech wouldn’t necessarily prove you’re a time traveler. You might be an alien or a mad genius pulling some kind of con. Spider Robinson uses that premise in one of his novels (LIFEHOUSE, I think); the supposed time traveler isn’t, and he’s tricking a pair of SF fans who are too eager to believe his story.

Documents reporting future events wouldn’t do much good. People in the past might reasonably suspect them of being faked.

You might make short-term predictions that astonishingly come true. That method would work if you’d prepared by memorizing lots of events from the historical record. Jake didn’t have time to prepare in that way. He has his friend’s exhaustive notes about Oswald but has to rely on his own sketchy memories for everything else, and he’s an English teacher, not a specialist in mid-20th-century history. He does have notes on sporting events, for use in gambling to replenish his financial cushion, and an uncannily accurate bet on a boxing long shot impresses his lady friend so that she’s prepared to believe the truth.

But what if the butterfly effect of your own presence in the past caused your predictions to come out wrong? Then nobody would have reason to believe you, and when it came to navigating the tides of history, you wouldn’t have much advantage over anybody else.

Jake mostly has the opposite problem. One of the novel’s themes is that “the past is obdurate.” It doesn’t want to be changed. The closer he gets to the major events of the era, the harder he’s swimming against the tide.

As far as bittersweet endings are concerned, this story is emotion-wringing. And the culmination of the time travel plotline wasn’t anything I expected.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Legendary sci-fi author Anne McCaffrey has died - Celebrity Circuit - CBS News

2011-11-23T12:24:00.000-05:00

Legendary sci-fi author Anne McCaffrey has died - Celebrity Circuit - CBS News

I can't put words to how this makes me feel, but I thought even though it's not my day to post, I just had to get this link up for you.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg