Books

In Defense of Jane Eyre

A while ago, there was a thing circulating among the classic literature fan groups on Twitter (and, yes, there are classic literature fan groups on Twitter) about figuring out the kind of person you are based on which classic literature you loved when you were a kid/teen, with the choices being Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, and Jane Eyre/Wuthering Heights, and if you chose the Brontes, you were supposedly someone who gets into unhealthy relationships and maybe is a bit goth.

I read Little Women as a child and didn’t like it much. The only character I liked was Jo, and I hated her outcome, and the rest of it I thought was a bit too sweet/cute. Plus, I’ve never had much interest in the US Civil War era. I didn’t read Pride and Prejudice until I was a junior in college, so I didn’t have an impression of it as a kid/teen. But I did read Jane Eyre for the first time in fifth grade, and I absolutely loved it. I may still like it a bit more than Pride and Prejudice, but they’re two very different moods, so I’d never enjoy one while I was in the mood for the other.

But I’ve never been all that “goth,” and I don’t have a thing for bad boys and unhealthy relationships. However, I’ve never read Jane Eyre as a romance. To me, the romance has always been secondary (in the book itself, though the film and TV adaptations focus on it). The book is really about a woman’s self-determination, going from being a pawn of fate to taking control of her fate. As a child, she’s subject to her aunt’s whims, she’s taken away to a school where she doesn’t even get to establish herself as herself, since she’s labeled based on what her aunt says, then she ends up working with someone who wants to control her life. Every step of the way, she remains true to herself. She refuses to lie to her aunt, even though she knows telling the truth will get her in trouble. She holds fast to her own identity in the terrible school and learns to stick to her faith and avoid things like revenge and hatred. When she learns Rochester has been lying to her about the mad wife in the attic, she refuses to live a lie with him and takes off on her own, but then when St. John Rivers wants her to live a different kind of lie, marrying him but living as brother and sister to be missionaries, she also refuses that, insisting on sticking to what she knows is right for herself. She builds a life for herself, doing something she believes in and knows is important. I’ve always found her story to be very inspiring. It’s not about her finding some fairytale prince to take her away from her troubles. She’s worked that out for herself before she gets the inheritance, and she has that inheritance before she goes back to Rochester, so she’s able to do so on her own terms and with a much more even power dynamic.

As for the relationship, I don’t think it’s the “she reformed the bad boy with her love” kind of unhealthy thing that people keep categorizing it as. Really, she reforms him with her contempt. When she finds out who and what he really is, she leaves him without a word. She doesn’t return to him until he’s had a big downfall and changed. Her contempt seems to have had a lot to do with him taking a good look at himself and realizing where he went wrong. I don’t see that as being too unhealthy. The unhealthy thing would have been sticking with him in the hope that he’d change, but if he changes on his own while she’s gone, then he might be worth taking a second look at. Still, I’ve never idealized that relationship. I’ve just admired her strength in being willing to walk away from him.

I last re-read Jane Eyre just before I started work on the book that became Rebel Mechanics. I originally had an idea of making it something sort of gothic-like, with the governess ending up in the spooky house full of secrets and lies. But Lord Henry refused to be a mysterious, brooding Rochester type, so I dropped that angle entirely. There were still secrets and lies, but the tone ended up being very different.

As for Wuthering Heights, I read that in my early 20s and again a few years ago, and I don’t see it as all that romantic. I don’t think it’s meant to be romantic. Heathcliff is clearly the villain of that book, not a romantic hero. In the 19th century Romantic movement sense, I think it’s more about nature vs. civilization, and Heathcliff and Cathy might have been okay if they’d been left alone to follow their natures, but they were destroyed by society trying to “civilize” them and put them into social constraints based on class. I’m not a huge fan of that story, but I do think it gets a bad rap from the misinterpretation as being a romance.

My Books

Status Update

Because I get a lot of questions, I thought I’d do a status report of sorts to let everyone know where various projects stand.

Enchanted, Inc. book 9 — Enchanted Ever After
Published! It’s available in e-book in most online booksellers. The paperback is supposed to be on expanded distribution, but I haven’t found it anywhere but Amazon so far. I’m not planning to offer it on Google Play because there have been some issues there. They can be difficult to deal with in ways that affect other stores (they change prices without consulting authors, then the other stores match their prices), and I only ever sell a few copies there, so it’s not worth dealing with them.
I don’t know when the audio version will be out. We made the deal for that earlier in the year and I set the release date to accommodate their needs, but then the contract ended up in limbo, and they changed their boilerplate contract, so all the terms had to be renegotiated. I still haven’t seen it. I also don’t know about any foreign markets. My agent has offered it to the Japanese publisher, but there’s been no answer yet.

As for what might happen beyond that, I am aware that there are events in the characters’ lives that might make good stories. But at the moment I don’t have much interest in writing them. I’ve been working in that world since 2003, and that’s a long time to work on a series. I wrote most of this book about two years ago and the rest of it about a year ago, and I knew while I was working on it that I didn’t think I could write another one. While there’s stuff in the characters’ lives that might be interesting, I am fresh out of magical plots for them, and I’m not interested enough in the domestic stuff to want to write about just that. It’s possible that a new idea will hit me that I must write, and there are potential side stories about other adventures that might happen to other people in that universe. I’m not saying never, but it’s been about a year since I worked on that book, and nothing has struck me.

Rebels 4
I’m doing some reading to research this book. I thought I had an idea for what might happen, and the research has changed the idea, so I have a lot of thinking to do. I plan to work on it later this year, and hope to get it released in maybe the late spring or early summer. That all depends on how long it takes me to write and what else ends up going on. I don’t think I’ll be able to wrap up the series with this book, so it’s possible that there will be another one after that, but I won’t know until I start writing.

The Fairy Tale series
Ah, my poor neglected stepchild. I love that world and those characters, and I have managed to sell it for audio and to Japan, but it seems to underperform. Meanwhile, my cover artist went and hit the big time, doing covers for Marvel, Star Wars comics and a Firefly piece. I’m so happy for her, but I doubt I can afford her anymore, if she can even squeeze me in. So, if I do another book, I’ll likely have to go a new direction with the covers (I’m not sure the direction I went with the covers was the most marketable. I absolutely love the art and it was just what I wanted, but I may not have made good choices from a marketing standpoint) and rebrand the whole series. I’ve sort of outlined the next book, but I don’t know when I’ll get to it. It isn’t exactly burning a hole in my brain, while there are other things that are jumping up and down and begging to be written.

Meanwhile, I have about five or six things that I really want to play with. I want to find a new traditional publisher, at least for my YA books, so I’ve been working on something new for my agent to submit. I’ve got ideas for a fantasy series and a paranormal mystery series. I’ve also got some ideas for big fantasy books that might go to a traditional publisher, but I’m hoping to raise my profile in that area first.

Oh, and I’ve got an Audible Original book that will be exclusive to audio for a year that’s supposed to be coming out later this year. It’s a contemporary fantasy with touches of romantic comedy and is unrelated to anything else I’ve done.

So, that’s what I’ve got going on and planned. Plans are subject to change based on inspiration, editorial revisions, life, etc. I’m mostly over my little existential crisis from earlier in the year. I realized that I do want to write, and I’d rather not do anything else, even if I could. I know I don’t really want to work in my old field, but I don’t know what else I could do. I registered with an agency for doing freelance work and have had no response, so it looks like I need to just stick with the writing. I just wish the business side of it wasn’t so challenging. I really do struggle with promotional stuff — a reason getting a job in my old field probably isn’t a good idea because that was my job. It does get depressing that my career seems to be moving backward, but I’m hoping I can move it forward again. The new book is doing pretty well, but it’s still only reached a tiny fraction of the number of people who read the earlier books, and most of the money I’ve made on it so far has just covered the cost of getting it published. But I’m trying to focus on the things I can control and just write without worrying about the rest of it.

writing

Impulsive Characters

After my rant last week about stupid characters, one of the next books I picked up opened with the heroine doing something stupid and impulsive that got her in huge trouble that ended up affecting other people in her life. Then her adult mentor got her out of that trouble and told her exactly what she needed to do — or not do — to avoid even more trouble that would affect her whole family, and about thirty seconds later she completely neglected to do what he told her she needed to do and went off and did something else and, yeah, got into even more trouble.

This was a YA book, and I know I’m not the target audience. Rash and impulsive is pretty much the teen “brand,” so maybe teen readers aren’t groaning about what an idiot the main character is. This book was really quite successful — a lot more successful than any of my books have been — so maybe the teen readers are enjoying the teen characters ignoring the adults in their lives, even if ignoring good advice leaves a swath of destruction in their wake. Meanwhile I, as an adult, want to give them a good spanking and ground them for about a month.

And I suppose there wouldn’t have been much of a book if the character had listened to the advice — though, really, the trouble she was in was big enough that I don’t think it would have made that much difference. I’d be a lot more sympathetic if she followed the advice and still ended up in trouble than I am when she rebelliously ignored the advice and landed in trouble.

It really is a tricky balance. Smart, reasonable characters who listen to good advice may not be as likely to get into the kind of trouble that makes for a good story. And this does give the characters room to grow. Maybe over the course of the book she’ll learn to listen and think before acting and will realize that her mentors know a thing or two. Right now, she’s just coming across as bratty, wanting what she wants, with no thought for the greater good or even the good of anyone else but herself, and that’s not sympathetic to me.

The heroine I’m writing now has done something quite rash and rebellious, but she thought it through and had a reasonable plan. I guess she was sensibly rebellious rather than stupidly rebellious. She ended up in way over her head, but she did avoid some danger. I’m saving the danger for later in the book.

writing

Finding the Right Villain

This morning I figured out the problem with the villain in the book I’m working on: I’ve been focusing on the wrong villain.

There’s still the big bad causing the societal problem, but I picked the wrong lower-level villain to be the heroine’s direct nemesis, the person who stands in the way of her achieving her goals. The one I was trying to make be her nemesis really has no reason to want to oppose her through most of the book, and he has no power to stop her from achieving her initial goal. He’s still an antagonist and he can be the kind of bully who makes her life miserable, but he can’t really do anything to stop her until maybe getting in the way toward the end.

It’s another character who’s been there all along but who I hadn’t really focused on who makes the best nemesis. He has a reason to be opposed to her, in particular, and he has the power to stop her from achieving her goals — all of them, both the one she initially thinks is important and then the real goal she later realizes is what she needs to do. He’s also an agent of the big bad, so he fits in with the big-picture conflict.

I may not even have to rewrite that much to bring this out, but I feel like this is the ingredient that’s been lacking, and emphasizing this conflict will make the book spark.

The challenge will be to actually write the conflict, since I tend to be conflict-averse. I don’t like torturing my characters, but I really must do so.

writing

Stupid Characters

One of my pet peeves in books (and other media) is dumb characters. I like smart people. I know that writing smart people is a challenge because it’s harder to get them in trouble or to keep their plans from working the first time. Unless you’re really good at finding motivations for smart people to do dumb things or unless you create really difficult circumstances, if your characters are smart, you get the world’s shortest story. If the characters in your horror story don’t go alone into the dark basement, the story never goes anywhere.

But it’s incredibly painful to read a story that relies upon the characters being too stupid to live to have a plot. I recently read one that shall remain nameless in which the heroine piled stupid thing on top of stupid thing. There was one toward the end that was a gray area, an action I’d put in the category of “stupid good,” where it might have been considered the right thing to do, but it also put a lot of other people in danger and could have ruined things for a lot of people, all to help people who wanted to harm the main characters. I might have been more forgiving of that one if the heroine hadn’t already betrayed all the people who had helped her. She thought she was doing the right thing then, too (though it was mostly to benefit herself), but the person she betrayed them to was practically twirling his mustache, he was so obviously evil, and he even expressed opinions that made it clear he meant harm, and meanwhile she had made zero effort to find out what was really going on with the people who were helping her before she spilled it all to Snidely Whiplash — only to find out about thirty seconds later that she was entirely wrong about everything. And this was after she’d been foolishly naive and careless near the beginning of the story in a way that led to her being in a predicament. This chick was just careening through life, causing chaos every step of the way, but the author wrote her as though she was super intelligent and careful, and the character who criticized her rashness was later said to be wrong and made to apologize.

And then the next book I picked up had another idiot character. It’s got a romantic triangle, where the heroine is horribly torn between the guy who just ditched his long-term girlfriend, has confessed that he cheated on her, has admitted he’s just looking to fool around now rather than get into a real relationship, and is flirting heavily with the heroine’s friend, who has a boyfriend, and the guy who has helped her out of a number of predicaments, actually listens to her and pays attention to what she wants, and lives in the place she wants to open a business. Not that she’s obligated to be into a guy who’s nice to her, but she is into him. She’s just torn because she got a crush on guy #1 years ago and decided then that she wanted him when he was free, and now he is, so she feels obligated to go for him, even though she knows he’s bad news and she really likes guy #2 better. That’s definitely Too Stupid To Live territory. You’re allowed to change your mind, especially when it’s just a promise you made to yourself (that’s another pet peeve of mine: the plot that revolves around a character doing something they know is a bad idea that they don’t even really want to do because they promised themselves years ago that they’d do it).

There’s a really fine line between letting your characters make mistakes and making them be stupid. Smart people can do dumb things, but you’ve got to motivate it. I tend to write stubborn characters (gee, I have no idea what I might be drawing upon there), since smart people often have a tendency to feel like they can figure things out for themselves and go it alone, and that can get them in trouble when they overestimate their abilities and hate to admit when they don’t know something. There’s also perfectionism, which might lead to waiting too long to act if they’re waiting until everything is perfect. You can also come up with emotional blind spots, where they’re bright about everything except that one thing that’s their weakness.

In the book I’m working on, I’m trying to make the heroine fallible, and it helps that she may be smart, but she’s entirely lacking in information because she’s essentially a foreigner in an unfamiliar culture she knows nothing about, and based on that lack of knowledge she misjudges a lot of people and situations. She rushed into something based on ideals and assumptions and realized she was in way over her head. There are things she misses because that sort of thing isn’t at all important to her, and she doesn’t realize that those things are very important where she is. Since the whole book is from her point of view, the reader is seeing her perspective but may get the sense that she’s misjudging things. I hope that works to build a little dread while still making it clear why she sees things the way she does.

writing

My Problem with Villains

I think I’ve figured out what I need to do to fix the ending of the book I’ve been working on. At least, I have a general sense of the problem and a few ideas of what I can do about it that I need to think about more. And it comes down to something that’s a regular problem for me: offstage villains. This is something that’s begging for a direct confrontation with the villain, and yet the heroes are just doing something on their own that’s a struggle but that has no direct opposition or confrontation.

I even figured out early on that the real villain isn’t someone this heroine could directly oppose. He represents a system/society that the heroine opposes, but he’s not someone the heroine can come face-to-face with and defeat, and in doing so show that she’s truly learned all the lessons she had to learn throughout the book. So, I created a secondary/subordinate villain who is someone she can oppose directly. He’s a representative of the big villain who is in the heroine’s direct orbit, someone who’s more or less a peer, so she can say the things to him that she’d want to say to the big villain.

And what did I do? I kept him mostly offstage, and then he disappears entirely at the midpoint of the book.

I have a real problem with villains. The thing is, I don’t find them interesting at all. I don’t care about their sad backstories, their motivations, or their goals. If they’re hurting people, I want them stopped, and if they can be stopped by the heroes being clever and subverting them rather than confronting them directly, so much the better. The less time we spend with villains, the happier I am. I want them out of my life (and the characters’ lives). I’m up for a redemption story, in which the villain realizes the error of his ways, regrets the evil he’s done, and works to atone, and I might be somewhat interested in a villain who’s being set up for a redemption, where during the pre-redemption phase he has a somewhat sympathetic motivation that isn’t entirely selfish, shows signs of potential for good, and shows conflict about doing bad things, and I’m horribly disappointed when villains are doing that but don’t have a redemption arc. But a villain who’s a villain? Snooze.

I may have been the only kid in my neighborhood who wasn’t at all interested in Darth Vader after the first Star Wars movie. As far as I was concerned, there was no “there” there. He looked cool and he was powerful, but that’s all there was to him. He was basically just a thug. Even the later revelations didn’t make him much more interesting, and I found his last-minute redemption to be weak and unsatisfying. Fleshing him out in the prequels made me even less interested because his turn to darkness wasn’t at all sympathetic to me.

But a good villain can make for a good story, and this story needs an antagonist, so I guess I have to find a way to make this guy interesting to me so I can keep him onstage and let my heroine thoroughly defeat him.

writing life

Rushing to the End

I finished my draft yesterday! But I already know I’m going to have to rewrite the ending. There’s a lot and not enough going on at the same time, and I seem to be missing a climactic final confrontation. There’s a big emotional moment, but the conflict is off the edge of the “screen.” There’s a danger out there, somewhere, but nothing direct that the characters have to confront. They’re just trying to get away from it. And then I’m afraid there’s a “Return of the King” ending, so the main plot ends, but then there are lots of little endings to wrap things up. Now that I have something on paper (well, metaphorically speaking), I feel like I’ve written an end, and that means I can think it through and come up with something without that weird anxious rush I always get when writing an ending. Sometimes I don’t want the book to end, sometimes I want to get it over with, sometimes I’m just excited, but I always careen recklessly through the last chapters and have to go back and rewrite.

This morning, though, I’ve been a complete slug. It was rainy, which always seems to make for a lazy morning, and I’ve been catching up on other things. There are errands to run and there’s housework to do.

And then back to writing. I’ve had the wacky idea that I need to write another Christmas book, and I’ve got an idea for a short story that might fit an anthology. Meanwhile, I’m researching ideas for the next Rebels book, and it may go in an entirely different direction than I originally planned. The planned book may get moved to the one after this one.

writing life

Optimizing My Life

This year, I’ve been contributing posts to Fiction University about various aspects of the writing life. My latest, from last week, is about creativity boosters.

This series has come out of my ongoing quest to optimize my life. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about productivity and creativity, and I think it’s making a big difference. For one thing, I’m really getting my house in order. Some of the trouble spots I’ve fought for years are clear and have stayed that way for weeks, even months. I’ve organized my closet and drawers, my bathroom, and my kitchen, and that’s turned into a big time saver because I don’t have to go searching for things. Everything I need is right where it’s supposed to be. I think I’ve shaved a good five to ten minutes off my morning routine just because I can just reach for what I need. That’s really nice on mornings when I have to be somewhere. There’s no frantic search for the shoes I want to wear.

Then the tidiness has led to being able to keep things cleaner. When you don’t have to move things to dust or vacuum, it’s quicker and easier to dust or vacuum.

This has a ripple effect that seems to be making me work more effectively. When the room is clean and orderly, I can focus on my work. I do still sometimes get sidetracked with thoughts about what I need to be doing, but it’s not quite as bad.

Meanwhile, I’ve really established an exercise habit, which also helps my productivity and creativity (there’s science behind that).

You can read a lot more of my tips in my Fiction University posts.

I’ve been doing this reading for years, but it seems to finally all be coming together. I think it really started when I was in physical therapy for my knee a couple of years ago. That meant I had to do exercises daily, and that started a new habit, which led to more new habits, and those new habits have pretty much stuck, so I’ve been able to start more new habits.

This year, I’m on track to have spent more time writing than I have in years, I just have the upstairs to get organized and cleaned (which has to wait for cooler weather because it’s unpleasant up there right now), and I’m on track to surpass my annual reading goal.

The really important thing I seem to have finally worked out is that failure in any one thing doesn’t mean everything has to fall apart. If I get busy and things get untidy, I don’t just give up (which used to be a bad habit of mine). I merely tidy it up again and get back to my habits. Ditto with exercise, eating right, and writing. In the past, every time I started a diet, exercise program, housekeeping routine, or writing schedule, I’d do fine as long as I could keep things the way I wanted them. Then when something upset my system, it would all fall apart. I seem to be doing better now about forgiving myself for little lapses and then going back to my routines.

My latest attempted habit development is focusing on promotion and marketing, trying to dedicate time to that every day, with plans for specific things to do. I’ve had lists of things I felt I ought to be doing that I never did, but now I’m trying to make it a priority to actually do them.

It’s weird how all of these things tie together — being more organized seems to make me not only more productive but more creative, and that spills over into being healthier, and the overall result is being a bit happier and more satisfied with life.

movies

Steampunk at the Movies

When I first had the idea for the book that became Rebel Mechanics, I started preparing to write it by reading every steampunk book I could find, just to see what the genre was like and what had been done with it. I determined that there were three primary approaches to a steampunk world.

One was alternate history — it was our world and our Victorian era, but technological development, and sometimes other factors, had gone a different way so that the steampunky elements and retrofuturistic technology existed.

The other was secondary world — it’s a fantasy world (like Narnia, Middle Earth, Westeros, etc.) that looks a bit like our Victorian era, but with stempunky twists.

The third was post-apocalyptic — in the future, society has been destroyed and has rebuilt to approximately a Victorian level of technology/culture, with twists that make it steampunky rather than the way our Victorian era was.

I obviously went with alternate history, but one of the steampunk series I liked the best took the post-apocalyptic approach — the Hungry Cities series by Philip Reeve, starting with the book Mortal Engines.

I was pleased and hopeful when I heard that they were making a movie out of that first book because if it did well, it might open the door to movie interest for the Rebel Mechanics books. Alas, the movie was rather a bomb, in spite of having Peter Jackson (of the Lord of the Rings movies) involved. I didn’t get around to seeing it at the theater, but out of curiosity I checked the DVD out of the library.

And ouch. It’s been about ten years since I read the books, so I don’t remember a lot of plot details, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t basically Star Wars. Some of the imagery was wonderful, bringing to life this weird world where the cities are mobile, on giant tank-like treads, scouring the earth for resources, and with some of the larger cities preying on smaller, less powerful cities. But so much of it also looked like a cheap Disney Channel production, especially when any characters were talking. And yet it didn’t seem like the movie was aimed at teens because the characters were significantly aged up (they’re 17 in the book, but one of the actors was pushing 30 when it was made, and the characters seemed to be treated like they were 20-something). I felt like the movie skipped on explaining anything that was going on, and like I said, the end sequence was basically the battle against the Death Star from Star Wars (or possibly the similar sequence from The Force Awakens).

The worse thing was, it was rather boring. Midway through the movie, I ended up looking up the entire cast and their histories on IMDB, and then got sidetracked in random web surfing. That’s a bad sign.

I had thought while reading the books that there was no way this would be filmable. It turns out that the stuff I thought would be impossible to film worked out rather well. But somehow they managed to miss the point of the books while writing the script and turned interesting characters into generic tropes. Great visuals can’t compensate for that.

So, if you love steampunk and were looking for a good steampunk movie, this isn’t it, and I’m afraid this movie might have killed steampunk on film, for a while, at least.

Rebooting the Year

I have survived the week of Music and Art camp, and I’m trying to get back into a work frame of mind, though I’m utterly exhausted and it’s difficult to focus. Being responsible for a big group of kindergarteners is draining. They’re really sweet, though, and I got a lot of hugs.

I am enjoying the quiet today. I haven’t even turned on a radio. I’ve thought occasionally about registering to be a substitute teacher to earn a little extra money every so often, but I’m not sure I could cope with a whole classroom of kids for a whole day. Three hours is about my limit.

The new book seems to be doing pretty well. I’m close to having made back my production expenses, and I’ve topped the threshold I set for myself to “earn” a vacation. I’d thought about taking a trip near Labor Day, when the hotel cost at a place I want to go is surprisingly lower than at any other time, but I’m not sure I want to go during hot weather. Maybe I’ll wait until closer to that date to see what it will be like and to decide if I want to go then or do something else in the fall when I can be outdoors more comfortably.

In the meantime, I’m trying to do a more regular workday and allocate time to do promotional activities. I need to be more organized about that, since the easiest way to earn more money is to get more people to buy the books I’ve already written. I keep saying I’m going to do that, but then I don’t work it into my plans, so it never seems to happen. We’re getting to back-to-school time, which feels like a second new year, even if I’m not in school, so it’s a good time to make a fresh start and reboot the year.