New post at #AmWriting blog today!

This piece was going to be presented without comment and tags of “pedantry” and “uninspired advice.”  I was that displeased by the result of my writing effort but out of time to make it better.

Then I got an unexpected hour to re-write my post–by which I mean, compose an entirely new post–and I am much happier with the new one.  In  “Portraif of a Lady’s Hand” I discuss how beautifully composing a photograph parallels writing a story…how the same sort of choices about what information to inlcude and what not to include make different stories out of the same scene.

So go read. And enjoy!  This one you actually might….

What Drives Honest Readers to Piracy

There is one state of being for a particular book that makes digital piracy an inevitability: lack of availability.

Last night I was in the mood to read a certain kind of story. I had a very specific book in mind, a romance I had seen at the bookstore at least a year ago, snapped a photo of, and waited to buy until I was in the mood for just that type of lip-smacking ridiculousness. This book is not available in stores anymore (I actually looked for it a couple weeks ago)–in fact, it’s not even available new from Amazon. Used only. A print book was not an option, as waiting a week to get it in the mail was patently pointless since it would satisfy neither my mood to read nor be any guarantee that when the book arrived I would actually want to read it…or at any point in the future be in just the frame of mind to read it.

Unfortunately an ebook edition was also not an option, because the publisher had not made one.

Publisher fail. I don’t know why a digital edition doesn’t exist–if the author was savvy enough not to let the publisher have the digital rights, why hasn’t she exploited them? If the publisher has them, why haven’t they?

All I know is, I wasn’t able to get the book I actually wanted to read.

The thing is, another book wasn’t going to do. So I did a Google search for the book. “Title ebook.”  I found an option for it. I even went to the site. It looked…legit-ish. Not actually legit, mind, not for sales of books, but for a pirate site it looked like it would give me what I was looking for and not a virus-infected .pdf of gibberish.

However, never having engaged in digital piracy, I couldn’t quite bring myself to sign up and download the thing (even though it would have been terribly appropriate as it was about pirates…SPACE pirates.  I know). I have friends who have pirated ebooks whom I will ask about resources they trust and places they avoid. Last night I didn’t feel like making any phone calls or waiting for an answer to a text or email. I turned on the TV instead.

So not only did the publisher of this title miss a sale on this particular book, they missed a sale on any book, by not making their goods available. Not publishing an ebook edition in the hopes of forcing me to buy print instead backfired, becuase instead I will not be purchasing the book at all.

And this is a textbook example of how you make an honest reader into a pirate: don’t let me purchase legitimately what I want to buy from you.

“My God, You Are Analytical”

This is a sister post to my previous discussion on being an INTJ writer.

I regard myself as being pretty self-aware in general. Often my conflicts with other people revolve around my sense of their lack in self-awareness. I know my own faults and strengths, and I work to alleviate the former and add to the latter. Where I think I lack the most perspective about myself, and always have, is the places I am different from other people in the way I think about the world.

This…lack of comparitive experience usually comes up when someone is describing me to myself. For example, my best friend’s dad, in the midst of a conversation about conflicts with my co-workers exclaimed out of nowhere (from my perspective), “My God, you are analytical!”

My mother-in-law has told me she really admires my ability to look at a large project and then break it down to its constituent parts in order to manage it, while she “would just sit there and stare at it and be overwhelmed.”

One of my best friends (an ex-boss…same job with the conflicts) has told me she is amazed by my ability to shrug off criticism and personal attacks, when to me it’s simply a matter of calibrating whether the criticim is valid, regardless of its source, and then whether the opinion of the source matters to me.  If either answer is no, then I can dismiss it because the sentiment doesn’t affect me. It’s not worth my time to notice. (This attitude sometimes bites me in the arse, such as that job, when I failed to consider that my co-workers’ bad opinion of me might extend beyond personal dislike and into professional sabatoge…but, then, who really expects a Beastie Boys song to become their life?)

But in the absence of someone making a comment like this to me, I tend to not think about the peculiarities inherent in my mode of thought.

Today, however, I shoved my own face in it. I was working on (still am working on, I should say) my post for the AmWriting blog for next week, and I just…sort of noticed how I was breaking down the concept into very logical little pieces that together could form something of a process. For people like me, who like to examine something angle by angle and only when all pieces have been considered step back to look once more at the whole.

I don’t know if I like the process I put down on paper or not. So far it sounds very prescriptive, and as though I approach the task with nothing but logic, when in fact I am much more intuitive about it…this is simply my explanation of what my intuition is sifting through sub-consciously to arrive at its conclusions.

But how do I explain THAT part of the process?….

Two by Two, Hands of Blue

Or, I Am Making Slow Progress and Using Violence in My Visualizations

September 14 is the one year point for this project. I am determined to be done with it by then. I would like to be done with not just the rough draft but also the rewriting, revisions based on beta feedback, and ruthless copyediting diet (where the manuscript struggles to lose every unnecessary word). I don’t know if that would be possible even if I finish the rough draft this weekend; it would cut it close. But at the very least I will not be writing anymore by then. I will be editing. Or finished.

So I have finally come to the last river I have to build a bridge across before I hit the climax.  The end of the book should be fun and easy to write. It is a very specific sequence of scenes and events, and it has been in place long enough in my outline for me to feel confident that I will not need additional scenes. The gray area has always been how to get from the last Event I knew about early on to the events of the end.  As with all fog banks, cloud does not seem so impenetrable from the inside of it, and that has proven true for me. I have three and a half more scenes that will be hard to write because they were not visualized in advance, but finally, finally, finally, I am sure that these are the last links through the nebulous “what happens between the sister’s debut and the end?” field.

I don’t know how long it will take me to get through this section in words, or how long the end will take to write. Or how long the beginning will take to re-write. Words have been hard to come by the last…month. I’ve gotten in the habit of forcing at least 100 a day. Not much, but something. With enough days it adds up. I am hoping this weekend will be more productive. No husband to spend time with as he will be on call and/or at work, no movies I need to watch for festival screening purposes, no projects of any stripe that would require my attention now as opposed to next week.

Time to get in my imaginary Hummer and just drive over the rubble of my writer’s roadblock.  Maybe I’ll back up over it again just for fun.

Time to drink all my ADD’s milkshake. I’ll drink it up! All gone.

Time to pull on my blue gloves.  Two by two, I will murder the words until the job is done.

Two by two.

What IS the Fantasy of Romance Novels?

To clarify: is the fantasy of the romance genre the story of two people finding true love? Or is the fantasy something more, something like the characters themselves, or the setting, or the story (not the result)?

Maybe this is a question that every reader has to answer for themselves. Maybe the answer for someone looking at the genre as a whole is the same as what “a man with two penises says when his tailor asks him if he dresses to the right or the left”–yes.*

I had this question shoved in my face a couple weeks ago when I was reading a discussion on some romance forum/blog or another. I don’t remember the context of the discussion, but rather the number of women who opined that OF COURSE the point of romance is the hot studly man you don’t have in real life.  OF COURSE the point is some exotic or fantastic locale you cannot live in as your normal life.  OF COURSE the point is some crazy story that would never actually happen to you.  All of which made me cringe away from the discussion and wonder if I am some kind of anomolous freak in the population of romance readers, that all of those things they list as being the point are turn-offs to me (at least in a general sense–I’m not saying a novel couldn’t overcome them, just that I would not read a book because of them and might, in fact, avoid books that have them).

Then I calmed myself with thoughts of the various romances I have read and loved over the years that have not been like that, that have been the kind I like–quieter stories about two people who fall into a love I can actually believe in (versus a panting lust). Obviously both types have an audience.

As a writer I thought back to this question the other day, when I was contemplating basing a (future) hero off my Parliament crush, who is starting to bald and not notably tall and while trim enough to look healthy, certainly not a six-pack ab type of man.  I could not think of a single romance hero with any of those traits.  I have  seen discussions complaining about the lack of “realistic” men in the genre on romance sites, as well, but I have to wonder…is the reason books never got published with that kind of hero because of NY editorial taste, or what NY editors perceived as the taste of the “average” romance reader, OR because readers don’t actually want less than perfect heroes?

Then there is another problem with “perfect” heroes, and that is the lowest-common-denominator vision of perfection.  My personal complaint about much of the romance I read is that the characters are, essentially, interchangeable. This phenomenon is similiar to that of rom-com movies, where you can almost predict the “personality” of characters because they are always the same. The books that are memorable for me are memorable because the characters are so uniquely suited to one another that you could not picture them happy with anyone else…

…the books where it’s obvious the two characters are not just two equitably good-looking and socally-positioned people who decide to marry.  I mean, let’s be honest, that is what most romance is…characters who discover how “sweet/smart/funny” each other are and have never found that with anyone else (mostly because they’ve never had a real relationship with anyone else), so they decide it must be twue luv. But you leave the book with the impression that any person with the same traits would have come to the same place with the character. I suppose in that sense all that’s left for a reader to hang onto IS the fantasy of super-attractive physicality or interesting setting or crazy story.

But I prefer my characters to be more unique and therefore memorable than that.  I mean, put any typical rom-com in contrast to a movie like Secretary, which shows two people who probably could not be with anyone else. THAT is a memorable love story.

So what part of romance is the fantasy–do readers want to be able to project themselves into it, in which case most of the characters need to be kind of generic, OR do they want a story of a love that could not happen between two different people than the ones in the story, even if it means they could not see themselves in it?

_______________

*Yes, I cribbed that from Lucky Number Slevin. That movie is my happy place.