Archive for February, 2020

Isn’t It Romantic? (Not)

Happy Valentine’s Day, to those who celebrate. I tend to find the holiday annoying because it seems so artificial. Celebrate your love on a day that means something to you, by doing something that means something to you, not by doing the expected things (flowers, chocolate, dinner) just because the calendar says so (aided by massive ad campaigns).

The other thing I find annoying is that this is when everyone pulls out the “look at these romantic things!” articles, and most of them are really off-base. The lists of “romantic” books tend to be lists of books written by men that are definitely not romance novels. Many of them are “guy” romances, which means the couple has a brief time of passion before either someone dies or they go their separate ways. The “happy ending” of a guy romance seems to always involve the guy either being single or dead.

Then there are the things everyone thinks of as romantic that really aren’t if you think much about it. Like Romeo and Juliet. That’s somehow become the epitome of romance, but I don’t think even Shakespeare meant it to be seen as super-romantic. It says right in the prologue and epilogue that it’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of a family feud, that when you have two polarized sides that are that entrenched, bad things are going to happen, and it took two kids dying to snap them out of their idiocy. The classical radio station has been playing romantic music today, and of course the Romeo and Juliet ballet music comes up. I may have shouted at the radio, “That’s not actually all that romantic.”

They’ve also played music from The Phantom of the Opera. I recall being rather irked during a recent touring production when all the ads promoted “the most romantic story ever told.” It is kind of romantic if you think of it as the love story of Christine and Raoul, childhood sweethearts reunited, and his love for her helped her escape an abusive, murderous creeper, but I don’t think that’s what they meant. But since the radio station played “All I Ask of You,” which is the romantic duet between Raoul and Christine, I’ll let it count as romantic.

For my celebration today of my most successful long-term relationship (me), I think I’m going to make something chocolate and watch Stardust, which is my favorite romantic fantasy movie. We’ve got a couple who initially dislikes each other, for good reason, then begins to like each other when they have to work together to escape from danger, and then falls in love. I need more movies like that.

Meanwhile, I’m writing while listening to the music the classical station considers romantic.

writing life

Title Woes

I’m halfway through the first draft of the book I’m working on. It took me weeks to get through the first quarter of it, but that was interrupted by all that construction work. Then it took me less than a week to write the next quarter. I guess I’m gaining momentum.

I’m trying to avoid the series burnout factor by working on some other things at the same time. In the evenings I’ve been researching another story entirely, and so far the two things haven’t clashed in my head. Sometimes I’m more fascinated by the potential of the one I’m researching than I am by the one I’m writing, but that’s where the daily word count goal comes in. When I hit that goal, I can play with research. It’s a win-win. I’m making the progress I need to, so I’m not neglecting one project, and knowing I can play with the other project is additional incentive to make progress.

I really need titles for these books and this series, and this genre requires something clever and punny, but I haven’t been able to think of anything yet. I may need to do a good brainstorming session after I finish this book. Titles are so hard for me. Either I start out with something perfect already in mind or I end up just sticking something generic on the book. I guess a couple of times something clever has come to me late in the game. For instance, Make Mine Magic was originally called Some Enchanted Evening, and that was a desperation move to just have something to stick on the book proposal. When even my agent was getting mixed up whether we were talking about that book or an Enchanted, Inc. book, I said we needed to change it. The new title came to me in a dream. I dreamed a scene in which that was said, woke up and wrote it down, then when I still liked it in the morning I suggested it to my editor. My other late-in-the-game title was Damsel Under Stress. That book had gone through edits and still didn’t have a title. We were starting to joke that putting it out with no title would be an innovative marketing scheme. Then one day in the shower, I was thinking of fairy tale related phrases and how I could twist them. I thought about how I was a damsel in distress, stressed about needing a title, and it clicked. I jumped out of the shower and wrote it down, and everyone loved it, though there was some confusion, since it sounds like “damsel in distress” when you say it out loud (which was the point). I had readers unable to find the book because they were searching for or asking for the wrong title, or if they asked for it at a store, the bookseller misunderstood, typed in “damsel in distress” and said the book didn’t exist.

I guess it’s possible for a title to be too perfect a pun. Now I need something along those lines for my mystery books. I may be taking a lot of showers soon.

publishing business

More Market Research

I continued my market research yesterday, and it was rather eye-opening. It turns out that the books I had in mind were classified as “fantasy romance,” and that bestseller list was almost identical to the “romantic fantasy” bestseller list. That category is all over the map. There were things like The Princess Bride in it, along with some fairly traditional fantasy by a Mormon author who’s a big champion of “clean fantasy.” And then there were books that looked like what I have in mind, those with covers that feature a woman in a fairy tale-like gown, usually in a forest or near a castle, with a kind of filigree frame around the cover.

Half of those were classified as young adult (so I don’t know why they were on an adult fantasy bestseller list). And half of them turned out to be what’s apparently the big trope right now, “reverse harem” (and, oh dear, the interesting spam I’m probably going to get on this post thanks to that term). That seems to be about a woman who has a whole team of men serving her in multiple ways (if you know what I mean). Some of them were pretty up-front about it, with that term in the subtitle or series description, but some were more subtle. I didn’t pick up on it from the book description, but then all the reader reviews were swooning over how hot the book was with all those men in the heroine’s harem. There seem to be some code words or phrases in the description that make it clear to those who know. I just thought the mention of four men meant it was setting up a romance-like series where there would be a team of guys who would each get to be the hero of his own book, with one of them ending up with the heroine of book one, and a new heroine for another member of the team in book two, etc. But it seems this heroine is greedy and keeping them all to herself. This would definitely fall into the category of “not to my taste.” Heck, with just one man I’d have to send him off on the occasional quest. I’d feel really crowded with four or five. And I’m probably going to get all kinds of bizarre Amazon recommendations now that I’ve looked at those book pages.

No wonder it’s hard to find things to read if you find “clean” Mormon-written books, YA, and that all in the same category, and they all have fairly similar covers. That also doesn’t make marketing easy. I don’t know if there’s an underserved market of people who want the kind of thing I have in mind and haven’t been able to find much of it or if there isn’t much of it because people don’t want it and it doesn’t sell well.

One thing that’s very difficult about product marketing is that there’s no way to measure unserved pent-up demand. Back in my PR days, I had a client that did supply-chain management, and that included the ability to measure what was selling so that stores could get more of what was selling better and less of what wasn’t selling. I once stumped them in a meeting when I asked how they could really measure that, since they couldn’t count the people who came into a store looking for something and walked out empty-handed because it wasn’t there. I have a problem finding my size in clothes because most stores only get in one or two items in my size, and they sell right away. Maybe that would trigger some systems to then order more if they sold that quickly, but generally it just shows that only two sold in that size, so that’s all they order in the future, and they have no way of knowing how many people didn’t buy anything at all because it wasn’t there in their size.

I think there’s a lot of that going on with books. You can only measure demand by looking at what’s selling, but if something doesn’t exist and people want it, you can’t know. Publishers decide what to publish based on how well the things that are already being published are selling. They don’t know how many people go to bookstores and walk away empty-handed because they don’t find what they want. The rise of independent publishing has shown that there were some underserved categories, usually at either end of the spectrum. “Clean” romances have done very well, since they’d stopped publishing books without graphic love scenes, but then the racier ones that go beyond what publishers were willing to do have also done really well.

It may be a leap of faith to see if there’s a readership for tamer character-driven fantasy. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want grimdark or harems of any kind.

publishing business

Market Research

I’ve been doing some studying about how to make a living publishing your own books and treat it like a business, since I came to the realization that it would be difficult for me to get a real job, so I have to make this work. I haven’t been very businesslike about it. I’ve just written what I feel like writing and thrown it out into the world. I’ve griped about how the traditional publishers have never done all that much for me, just throwing my books out there with little to no marketing support, but I’m doing the same thing. I’m trying to be more focused and strategic and learn what I can do to make this work as a business.

One thing I’ve never done much of is market research. At best, after I’ve written something I’ll look around for other things kind of like it to get cover ideas. I’ve never really been all that systematic about it. The guide I was reading suggested looking at the Amazon bestseller list that best reflects your subgenre and looking at whether you could imagine your book fitting in there. Then look at the sales rank for the #1, #5, #20 and #50 books. If they’re all really high in the overall rankings, that means there’s a good market for what you’re writing, but it also means it’s a competitive category.

The mystery series I’m working on fits perfectly in a couple of categories, and I could see those kinds of covers fitting it. It’s a moderately strong category, with the top-selling books really high in overall rankings, but once you’re down around #50, they’re fairly high but in a range I’ve hit with some of my previous books. So, that’s good. I seem to be on target there.

Then I tried looking up things that might fit the fantasy series I have in mind. I could swear that I’ve seen books that fit my general category and that have the sorts of covers I envision, but I only saw one or two of these on any of the category bestseller lists I tried. I’d been thinking they’d fit into romantic fantasy, but it looked like most of those books were really dark and sexy, and more contemporary than a traditional historical fantasy setting. Although these wouldn’t be actual fairy tale-based stories, I do think they’d have a fairy tale feel and I’m drawing on some tropes from fairy tales, so I tried the fairy tale fantasy chart, and it fit a little better there. But that seems to be a really competitive category. Everything in the top 50 was way up the overall charts. There was also no real consistency so that you could look at a book and know it was that kind of book. I may need to look up the books I know of and see how they’re categorized, then work backward from there.

I suspect in that area I may have the problem I’ve had with a lot of my other books, which is that they don’t fit neatly into any one category and there isn’t a lot like them on the market. That’s made it difficult for me to sell to the major publishers, since they want comp titles and are leery of something that doesn’t readily compare to something else that’s selling well. And I’m afraid it’s making it harder for me to sell these books independently. It turns out that writing what I want to read but that I can’t find isn’t a great business strategy. Go figure.

I’ll still write these books because I want to and I think there are readers. I may write one series more for money and the other more for love, and I’ll have to be strategic about marketing.

The other thing I’m seeing in everything I read about the business is that you really need to have a mailing list and newsletter. I’ve resisted because I hate them and I feel like everyone is totally bombarded by them, but if absolutely every book on publishing says this is the #1 thing you need to do, it may just be possible that they’re right. So I guess I need to find a mailing service and figure out how to add a link to my web site, and then I need to come up with content.

Finding Motivation

Well, apparently the weather does take requests because I got my rainy Sunday afternoon for listening to music, drinking tea, and reading, and it was divine. Even better, the weather looks like it will be similar next Sunday afternoon.

I don’t have any real obligations this week other than choir, so I’m hoping to make big progress on my book. I had just started to really dig in at the end of last week, probably thanks to me finally turning on the project tracker in Scrivener. Being made acutely aware of how many words you’re writing and how many words you need to write makes a huge difference. The moment I see that red bar on the screen, I’m driven to turn it orange, then yellowish, then green. Then there’s the joy of seeing the next day’s goal recalculated if I go over the goal.

I guess this is the adult writer version of getting a sticker.

It’s a bit sad how well this works. I’d hope that I’d be capable of doing what I need to do without that visual reminder, and sometimes I can, but it’s almost like magic for creating accountability. It even seems to make writing sessions go faster.

Now I need something like that for tracking things like housework. I know there are to-do list apps and things that turn it into a game, where you score points by having good habits, but I tend not to check into those. I want to be online less, not more. This works because it’s part of the tool I use for the task I’m tracking. What I need is a vacuum cleaner that shows you how often you’ve used it and gives you points. A Fitbit would do the same thing for exercise, so maybe I should break down and get one. In the meantime, I am actually giving myself gold stars on my calendar on days when I exercise. It’s surprising how motivating that is.

Books

Jane Austen, Master Worldbuilder

One area of interest that I’ve found a lot of fantasy and science fiction authors and fans share is the works of Jane Austen. I’m not sure what the connection is, other than perhaps the sense of worldbuilding. Austen wasn’t really doing worldbuilding the way we think about it. She was just writing what she knew, the society around her. But it’s such a vividly depicted world that’s utterly alien to modern readers that it functions like reading a fantasy or science fiction novel set in another world. We know exactly how her world works, what the social rules are, what the expectations are for each kind of person and how the different groups are meant to interact. We know what they do for leisure, what their spiritual beliefs are and how they vary from person to person in the way they actually carry them out. We know what their courtship rituals are and what the penalties are for violating those rules. If you’re writing about another world, reading Jane Austen will teach you a lot about how to depict that world in a story and use the rules of the world to create tension and conflict and to drive the plot.

Although there’s a lot more narrative exposition than you can get away with in a modern novel, the interesting thing about Austen is the way she lays out the rules and how they affect the plot. It usually comes through dialogue, and the dialogue happens because those rules are creating some kind of conflict, like Mrs. Bennet’s diatribes about entailment and inheritance laws that mean her daughters have to find good husbands because they won’t inherit their father’s estate. That drives most of what happens in the novel, and you come away from reading Pride and Prejudice understanding how it all works without there having been that much exposition.

PBS is currently showing the series Sanditon, which is based on the fragment of a novel Austen left unfinished when she died. She only wrote eleven chapters, and in those chapters she mostly established the main cast of characters and the situation they were in. The plot hadn’t really kicked in yet, other than setting up that it was going to have something to do with turning a small seaside town into a fashionable resort while a bunch of relatives are campaigning to inherit from a wealthy elderly woman who has no children to inherit. The TV series takes this setup and spins a story from it. I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. I suppose it might be okay if you just take it as a costume drama that happens to be set in the Regency era. It doesn’t really work as any kind of Jane Austen story for me, mostly because I think the screenwriter forgot that one of the keys to Austen’s works was a strong sense of how that world worked. This show goes far astray from any sense of those rules and structures, but also without a sense of real tension coming from those rules or consequences of those rules being violated.

I kind of think Jane is spinning in her grave. I’m watching because I’m curious how it will all play out. The edition of the novel I have is completed by “another lady,” and I may read the rest of it to see how that author sees it. It’s like Jane Austen left a writing prompt and it’s up to us to figure out how to finish the story.

Winter

We had something approaching winter yesterday. It was cold and rainy, with bits of sleet. I didn’t have children’s choir, and they canceled choir practice because there was a chance of it getting below freezing while the roads were still wet, so I had a delightful evening of snuggling under the electric blanket with candles going in the fireplace (I have a fireplace candelabra, which gives the flickering light of a fire without the mess or without having to open the damper and send all the warm air up the chimney), classical music on the radio, and a good book — basically, peak hygge. I even went to bed early.

And because I went to bed early, I seem to have forgotten to set my alarm. I woke up at about the usual time, anyway, then since there was nothing pressing, I let myself lie there for a while, which meant I went back to sleep. I have a thyroid condition, so I’m supposed to be watching for signs of low thyroid, like fatigue. I worried for a moment when I overslept in spite of going to bed early, but then I remembered that more than ten years ago I was using a TV show that came on in reruns at 9 a.m. as a way of forcing myself out of bed in the winter. Sleeping until 8 is actually an improvement. I really am part bear, I think. When Daylight Time begins, I’ll be hopping out of bed much earlier.

Today it’s colder than it was yesterday, but it’s sunny, so it feels less wintery. The annoying thing about this winter (for me) is that it’s been warm and sunny on weekends and the cold, rainy days have always been Wednesdays. On weekends, I could hide under my blanket and read, but on Wednesdays I have choir stuff, so I have to go out.

I’m willing to compromise and take a cold, rainy weekday other than Wednesday, and then I can switch workdays. Still, there’s something about a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon (with the rain starting after noon, since I have to go out on Sunday mornings) with a good book, a pot of tea, and the appropriate music as I lie on my bed or sofa under a blanket. It looks like Valentine’s Day is going to be cold and possibly rainy, so maybe I’ll indulge myself then. There may even be baking.

For today, though, I have writing to do. I’m making headway on the book I’m drafting, and I’ve set a deadline for myself.

My Books

New Anthology on Kickstarter

I mentioned a month or so ago when outlining what was coming up for the year that I’d contributed a story to an anthology that was going to be Kickstarted soon. Well, that Kickstarter is now live.

The anthology is called Where the Veil is Thin, and it’s a collection of stories about the fae from a range of authors, including me. I don’t write a lot of short stories, and if this book ends up happening (it has to be fully funded up front), it will be my first official short story sale.

Here’s the Kickstarter page if you’re interested or want to support it.

I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a Kickstarter for a book, mostly as a way of raising awareness/excitement, but I think for now that it would be a lot of work, so I think I’ll just keep funding the production costs myself and hope that the books turn a profit. It is cool that things like this exist to help people get their dreams out into the world, though.

I should probably try to write more short stories, but I’m more of a novelist and most of my stories tend to grow into novels. I think having a prompt helped. They invited me to contribute to this book, which was a huge honor. I guess it helped that I knew one of the editors. We met at the Serenity premiere event in LA years ago and ended up sitting together at the movie. It’s strange how something like that ended up coming around to something work-related. You never know. The world is a funny place.

Don’t Know Much About History

For the fantasy world I want to build so I can set a bunch of loosely related stories there, I’ve been reading a lot of history. I’ve always been a big history buff. I read history for fun and most of my electives in college were history courses. And yet I’m still learning new things. There are aspects of history that I’m only just now starting to understand.

I know it’s a broad topic, but in general, I think the way history is taught in American (or possibly just Texan) schools is woefully inadequate. All my junior high and high school history teachers were coaches. That meant they taught history by telling us to read the chapter in the textbook and answer the questions at the end of the chapter while they sat at their desks and read the sports sections of all the newspapers the library got. Occasionally, they’d show a film. Even so, they never seemed to get all the way through the textbook. In eighth grade, American history, part one, ended just before the Civil War, even though the textbook covered the Civil War (though I guess we were lucky there because some schools in the south never cover much other than the Civil War). Then in 11th grade, it picked up after Reconstruction but barely got beyond WWII. World History was even worse. I got so frustrated in that class that I took over and started teaching it in a vain attempt to make it even slightly interesting.

If all you knew of history was what you learned in school in the schools I went to, you’d be utterly ignorant, which explains a lot about our nation today. Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it, and all that.

I picked up more in college, but those were deep dives into particular topics, and I was focusing on modern European history because at the time my goal was to be a foreign correspondent.

I didn’t get a really good understanding of the American Revolution and the issues relating to it until I started researching the Rebels books. In my recent reading, I finally get what was going on with the Thirty Years War, in spite of growing up with ruins from it all around me. I’m starting to have the big picture of world history click into place, which makes some current events make more sense.

The problem with the way they tend to teach history (at least, in my experience) is that they focus on names and dates, when really it’s about stories. Some of this stuff, you couldn’t put it in a fantasy novel because it would be considered too outrageous to be believed.

I kind of love that it now counts as “work” to read lots of books about history. I seem to be working my way through the history section of my local library branch.

movies

Fun Fantasy Movies

Since I had a free couple of nights and I was enjoying my newly repaired living room, I thought I’d do a couple of movie nights over the weekend. And then I ran into a problem: there’s very little of the sort of thing I want to watch, and I’ve already got those things more or less memorized.

I wanted a kind of romantic fantasy adventure — something that’s more about a small group of characters than about an epic cast of thousands, as fantasy tends to go these days. Basically, I want Stardust, but that I haven’t seen a gazillion times and almost have memorized. Or The Princess Bride, and ditto. If you go back to the 80s and don’t mind bad (to current eyes) special effects, there’s Ladyhawke (but I wish we could get the edition with the music from the European release because the US music is so out of whack with that movie) or Willow. A couple of the “fantasy cheese” movies they used to show on Saturday nights on SyFy kind of fit, but they can also be rather painful.

And that seems to be about it. I did a lot of scrolling and searching on Amazon Prime and a few other services and didn’t come up with much of anything. I ended up watching Thor on Friday night because I figured that his backstory would be more fantasy-like (it was), and there was romance and action, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch. For Saturday night, I rewatched the Disney live-action Cinderella, which is pretty much my “happy place” movie. I guess the big carriage chase sort of tips it into the “adventure” category, so it might loosely fit what I’m looking for.

It does seem like the fantasy genre has gone to where it’s either a fairly dark epic with lots of battles, like Lord of the Rings, or it’s fairy tales done by Disney. I like the Disney fairy tales, but they’re not quite what I’m looking for.

A live-action version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty might be fun — and not from Maleficent’s perspective where she’s the real victim (ugh). Do it more like Cinderella, where it was a new telling of the same tale, with a few nods to the Disney cartoon, rather than a direct remake of the Disney cartoon. Flesh out the relationships and characters, maybe have Philip and Aurora meet a few more times (they can have been running into each other in the woods throughout their lives), and then there’s the potential for an epic action sequence near the end with the battle with the dragon.

Are there any romantic fantasy adventure films I’m missing? Something along the lines of Stardust?