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Tea and Fortunes

I recently read a book that was absolutely warm and delightful, perfect for if you need something that makes you feel good and believe that humanity may be worthwhile after all. I think a lot of my readers might want to check out The Teller of Small Fortunes, by Julie Leong.

The book is about an immigrant fortuneteller who travels with her mule and wagon, telling only small fortunes—not major events or big futures, but little things that might affect individuals in small ways. She’s been fine being alone, but then she finds herself traveling with others as they join up with her. There’s a former thief and his former warrior friend who’s searching for his lost daughter, then later an aspiring baker seeking adventure. They all team up to travel in search of the lost child, but then the fortuneteller catches the attention of the mages, who believe anyone with any power has to work for them.

This book has a lot of things I love in a story. There are great arcs for all the characters. There’s a lovely sense of found family, with strangers coming to form bonds and look after each other. People make good decisions. The ending is so satisfying. I got this from the library, but I think I’ll be buying a keeper copy because this is very much a comfort read kind of book. There is some tension, but it’s not uncomfortably stressful.

You may want to have baked goods and tea handy for reading, though. All the talk about the tea the fortuneteller serves and all the talk about baked goods will make you hungry for tea and rolls. You find yourself wanting to drink tea, eat baked goods, and hang out with these people.

This is essentially a standalone novel. Everything is wrapped up for these characters, but it looks like there’s another book set in this world coming later in the year. I’ll definitely be looking out for that.

movies, TV, Books, writing

Heroes and Villains

Some of the recent author discourse online this week has involved the nature of heroes and villains and the author’s responsibility in writing them. This stemmed from a statement from one of the writers of the TV series Breaking Bad about how maybe writers needed to think of the implications of what they wrote, after viewers seemed to have missed the point of that series. I didn’t watch it because it’s very much not my sort of thing, but I understand it’s a series about a high school chemistry teacher who finds out he has cancer and to provide for his family (possibly because insurance is bad and he won’t get good benefits?), he starts making and selling meth. Since he knows chemistry, his meth is superior to that made by trailer park junkies, and he becomes a sort of drug kingpin. This writer talked about how audiences saw him as a sympathetic figure who was doing what he needed to do to care for his family in an unjust system, but the writers thought they made it clear that this was just an excuse he used, while he actually ended up doing it for the power and money.

I have to say that this writer sounds pretty naive. You have a character in a respected profession that’s often seen as an underdog in society, dealing with something a lot of people can relate to (struggling with health insurance and finances), so people are going to sympathize with him and relate to him and try to justify his actions.

However, it doesn’t take a teacher with cancer dealing with health insurance for audiences to sympathize with bad guys. I’ve been around online discussion of various fictional things (TV, movies, books) since the mid-90s, and I’ve seen that it doesn’t take much for certain members of the audience to like and sympathize with the villain, even if they have to make up reasons to do so. You could have an unrepentant puppy murderer, and there would be people claiming he’s really just a softy, and he only murders puppies because the good guys were mean to him about his puppy murdering (especially if he’s attractive or charismatic). He could be saved and changed if only someone treated him right.

There’s what I call the hero/villain double standard. A villain doesn’t have to do much to be hailed as heroic. He just has to do one good thing, or sometimes even refrain from doing something bad one time. On the other hand, it sometimes seems like the most evil thing a hero can do is try to be a good person, so that even the slightest failure to live up to that ideal is worse than any evil the villain does. And yet, actually succeeding in being good makes him holier than thou and boring, and audiences want him cut down. The puppy murdering villain can be hailed as a hero for letting one puppy go, while the hero will be vilified for taking the largest brownie (but also criticized as holier than thou and too good to be true if he takes the smallest brownie).

But you can’t write for that audience because they’ll never be happy. They’re suspicious of people who try to be good and they think they can save villains.

I think writers may unintentionally feed into and encourage these views, though. While a villain redemption story can be satisfying under some circumstances, too many of them and you start to perpetuate the myth that all villains are actually good inside or doing their evil for selfless, good reasons. Writers like to redeem villains because it makes for a big, dramatic character arc — from selfish and evil to heroic. Meanwhile, the arc for a good guy usually isn’t so dramatic. At best, you get the farmboy to hero arc, where he’s not so bad at the beginning and all he really does is level up to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The way you get more drama is to tear down the hero and find his flaws.

In the world of series, especially long-running types of series like on TV, the structure of a series encourages the villain redemption arc. The villain is probably one of the more popular characters, but if you keep the same individual as the foe for too long, both the hero and the villain start to look incompetent if neither manages to defeat the other. You really can’t permanently defeat the hero of a series, but you don’t want to get rid of your most popular character. The answer is that you redeem the villain and bring on a new villain, so in later installments, the original villain is at first a reluctant ally with the heroes against the new villain, and gradually turns into a full-on hero. Viewers learn to look for the reasons that any villain will eventually become a hero, and as the villains and former villains remain popular characters among outspoken viewers, writers start focusing on them, sidelining the original heroes and not writing for them, so the heroes become more boring.

I’ve also seen people theorizing that Americans tend to go for underdogs who fight the system and challenge the status quo, but most of the heroes are defending the status quo, while the villains are the ones fighting the system (never mind that they’re often doing so for selfish reasons). I’m not sure I entirely agree with that, since there are way too many examples that go the other way around. In the Captain America movies, the most upright, pure of heart Marvel superhero is fighting the system and going rogue. He’s going against orders to do what he thinks is right, going against what he believes to be a corrupted organization, and even going against the other superheroes when he thinks they’ve sold out. (And, of course, a lot of fans vilified him when he finally made a selfish choice for his own happiness.)

Most of the Star Wars movies and shows have the heroes being rebels or resistance fighters against an evil system. The exception would be the prequel series, which was odd because the real villain was controlling both sides to undermine the system while the heroes were fighting to defend a system that they didn’t know had been corrupted. The least successful series so far, The Acolyte, was the one with the villains rebelling against the “good guy” Jedi system that was questionable. They find a middle ground in the shows centered around the Mandalorian, where the good guys aren’t really a part of the establishment and are sometimes in opposition to it while they’re also fighting outright villains, which puts them on the same side as the establishment.

And people still sided with the bad guys when they were the ones representing “the system.” I remember 1977, before Darth Vader had a sympathetic backstory, long before anyone imagined he’d be redeemed. In that first movie, he was mostly just a henchman supporting an evil bureaucrat, and he was an extremely popular character. There were “Darth Vader Lives!” t-shirts. Really, he was a cool costume and an awesome voice, and he had power he wasn’t afraid to use. Who hasn’t wanted to Force choke someone during a staff meeting? But none of the usual rationales for why people side with villains applied to this character in the original movie. He was mostly just intriguing and looked cool.

I think the answer isn’t to stop writing cool villains, lest audiences sympathize with them. It’s to write better heroes. Push audiences to sympathize with them. Don’t be afraid to make them human or flawed, but highlight where they’re good and heroic. Make them cool enough that people might want to be them. The writer has to like the good guys before the audience will.

movies, Books

Out of Order

Last Friday, I figured I should celebrate Valentine’s Day with something somewhat romantic, but I wasn’t in a very romantic mood, so I ended up watching 500 Days of Summer, a somewhat anti-romantic romantic comedy. I’m not super-strict about my definition of “romantic,” so I’m okay with a hopeful ending, even if it doesn’t involve the main couple in the movie.

This is a rather unconventional romcom that questions a lot of the premises common to the genre. It’s told in a non-linear way, starting with a breakup and bouncing back to a first meeting, then ahead to an established relationship, then back to starting to get together, etc. Tom is a hopeless romantic who’s looking for “The One” who’ll complete him. Summer is a free spirit who doesn’t believe in love and doesn’t want to be tied down. Tom meets Summer and is sure she’s The One when he learns she likes his favorite band. They argue over the issue of love, and his hopes are dashed when she tells him she doesn’t believe in it, but then she kisses him, they start dating, and everything is perfect, until it isn’t and he doesn’t know what to do.

I recently saw some online discourse about the movie (which is probably why it caught my eye). Apparently there’s some debate over which of them is in the wrong and the bad guy. Is she bad for telling him she didn’t believe in love, then dating him anyway, or is he bad for expecting her to fall in love with him when she told him she wouldn’t? Is she a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or is he trying to cast her in that role? I would say they’re both at fault. She sent seriously mixed signals, saying one thing and then acting another way, but he was in love with an idea, and she happened to be the person he cast in that role.

But the main thing I like is the nonlinear structure that makes the audience have to piece things together, where we don’t see how it all fits together until toward the end. I love stories that do that sort of thing or that play with narrative structure in fun ways.

In the romantic comedy space, there’s Sliding Doors, which has parallel timelines — we see the heroine miss a train after losing her job, leading to her getting mugged, then because of that she gets home late enough that she doesn’t catch her boyfriend cheating on her, and her life becomes a struggle. But then we also see the heroine barely catch the train, so she gets home in time to catch her boyfriend, which leads to her starting her life over, starting a business, and starting a new romance. We cut back and forth between the timelines. Which one is the “good” one and which is the “bad” one, and how will it work out?

Or there’s The Very Thought of You, which plays with perspective. We see the same events multiple times through the perspectives of three friends who all meet the same woman on the same day, and we only realize what’s really happening when we put them all together and know what’s happening in the background of each of the scenes.

I’m With Lucy starts with the ending — the heroine is on her way to her wedding. She got there after a time when she said yes to every blind date. We go back to these dates and the relationships that came from them, jumping around a bit in time. Which of these guys is she marrying?

Getting away from romcoms, there are movies like Memento, which is told in reverse order, and Inception, with the lines between dream and reality blurred. The first season of Once Upon a Time had dual timelines, with flashbacks going mostly in reverse chronological order gradually showing how the present-day situation came to be, while the characters worked to resolve the situation in the present (the flashback format continued through the series, but it mostly became thematic, showing an incident in a character’s past that reflected the character’s present).

I haven’t seen it done so often in books, but there’s a time travel book by Connie Willis that plays with this, Blackout/All Clear. It’s a story in which time traveling historians from the future go to the time of World War II to study it, but something goes wrong, and they’re stuck there as the Blitz begins. But there were other previous missions involving some of the same people to different times in the war, and since they took on cover identities and the story is told using the cover name, we don’t know which characters are the same people at different times until later. There’s also the mix of what’s happening chronologically within the war era and what the timeline is in the “present,” which can mean that a person from earlier in the present might be later in the war than they are in the current mission that started later in the present. This is a kind of storytelling that would be less effective in a movie because it would be more obvious that they’re the same person. In the book, there are a lot of “ohhhh” moments of realization.

I have ambitions of writing something like this, either out of order or otherwise nonlinear. The closest I’ve come was my Christmas novella, which was similar to Sliding Doors, except the heroine was living both timelines and aware of both of them, so she had to figure out which life she wanted and how to stick with that one instead of living both of them. I have an idea that might fit into the nonlinear category, with flashbacks where you don’t know which present character is the person in the flashback, but the whole idea hasn’t really come together yet, and the concept is more ambitious than I feel up to tackling right now.

TV, movies, Books, writing

Shipper Bait

Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.

Books

Fantasy or Science Fiction?

I just read a book that wasn’t what I expected it to be, but that I’m very glad I read. Before the winter storm hit, I went to the library and stocked up on reading material. I grabbed a book that was displayed face-out. It had a very cozy fantasy-style cover and the library had put a unicorn “fantasy” sticker on the spine, so that was what I was expecting. It turned out not to be fantasy, really. It was closer to science fiction (though with some elements that could be either mystical or scientific, so I’ll let it slide). But it’s not spaceships and robots science fiction. It’s more like Jules Verne science fiction, about underwater exploration, but in a very Victorian way, even if some of their technology is far more advanced than in the Victorian era, possibly in some places more advanced than ours. I suppose you could call it cozy science fiction, though, since it’s low-conflict and there’s no villain, no evil, just people fascinated with nature.

The book is A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall. It’s an epistolary novel, told entirely through letters and documents. There’s a framing story in which some disaster has happened about a year ago that seems to have killed a man and a woman. In the present, the man’s brother and the woman’s sister begin corresponding as they try to piece together what happened to their siblings. As they write to each other, they share whatever information they have, including the letters their siblings wrote to each other, letters they wrote to their siblings (and vice versa), journal entries, correspondence with other people, etc. In the past story, we see a reclusive and anxious woman who lives in an undersea house write to a scholar about something she observed, and the two of them strike up a friendship and eventually fall in love through an ongoing correspondence. Meanwhile, her sister is part of a deep-sea exploration mission and sends reports back home. In the present, the brother and sister are investigating based on what they uncover, and they share their thoughts and findings.

The fun thing about an epistolary novel is that the reader has to make the connections and put together the puzzle pieces to figure things out. The writers don’t discuss much about their world and society because they take it for granted. There’s no narrator to explain things to the reader. The book has a very Victorian tone, and the bits of their society we see seem to reflect that. It appears to be on another world that’s not our earth, and we don’t see what (if any) connection it has to earth, whether this is in our past or in a distant future (which may be why it has a fantasy label on it—it may be secondary world fantasy with or without overt magic).

It’s not a page turner in the usual sense, with lots of action and peril, but I found myself drawn through the story by curiosity about what happened, and I felt a lot of intimacy with the characters, since I was reading their private letters. The scholar fits the mold of the kind of “adorkable wizard” I tend to write, and I found myself identifying way too much with the reclusive woman. Reading between the lines, I got a sense that she has a degree of OCD, which makes me wonder if I should have myself evaluated. There was a suggestion that she was known to be not well, but I related a lot to the way she thought and acted, so she seemed perfectly normal to me. It does take a while for the story to really get going, as we’re following the characters getting to know each other and starting to discover things. Then it picks up in pace and intensity as the pieces start coming together—only to end in a cliffhanger just as things take a turn. I’ll definitely be looking for the sequel. Per Amazon, it’s coming in May.

The promo text on Amazon refers to these books as “magical academia,” which would make it fantasy, so I guess the library wasn’t wrong. It’s definitely on that blurry, hard-to-categorize line. I guess I was expecting a more traditional fantasy setting based on the cover and the unicorn sticker, so it threw me a little to start reading and have underwater habitats and submarines, but it gave me a lot of the same vibes as a cozy fantasy book.

Anyway, I think a lot of my readers would enjoy this. If you liked my Rebel Mechanics books, you might like the Victorian style, and if you like my adorkable wizards you’ll love these characters.

movies, Life, TV, Books

2024 in Review

Happy new year!

I’m still considering this to be a semi-holiday before I plunge back into my regular routine (or my new, improved routine) next week, but it’s a good time for a year in review and a look at what’s ahead.

The big thing for 2024 was my cross-country move. That was a major change of scenery and lifestyle, and it really disrupted things for a while. As a result, I didn’t get as much written as usual, and I had the fewest books read of any year since I’ve been tracking.

It was kind of a reading slump year, probably for a lot of reasons. I know I didn’t read a lot during the prep/packing/moving/unpacking phase. I also didn’t have a lot of work-related reading. I wasn’t doing serious book research, so I didn’t have any reading that fit into my working time. Usually that accounts for a lot of books every year. I think I’ve been getting out a lot more, too. During the fall, I was out exploring most Saturdays, time when I might have been reading. In the summer, there were concerts in the park in the evenings.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, I wasn’t really prioritizing reading time. One issue with not having a dedicated office is that I have the computer right in front of me all the time, and it’s easy to fall into the habit of surfing the Internet or doing online puzzles and not pick up a book. One of my intentions for the new year is to be more deliberate about how I use my time. It doesn’t help that now I’m getting my newspaper online. When I get a house with an office, I may see about getting a larger tablet to use for things like newspaper reading so I can keep the computer in the office — and I won’t set up the tablet to access any of my social media accounts. I have a tablet, but it’s a small one the size of a book, which isn’t great for reading newspapers.

I think my favorite find of the year was the Seven Kennings books (first book is A Plague of Giants) by Kevin Hearne — a really different approach to epic fantasy with a very fun narrative style. I read those early in the year, before the move, so I was surprised to check my records and see that I read them in 2024. It seems like so long ago.

I didn’t really watch TV in 2024 other than on streaming, and there I was mostly catching up on older things I missed. The transition to the eastern time zone has messed me up for network TV because everything’s on so late. I enjoyed the Star Trek series Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds, and I’m loving the Star Wars Skeleton Crew series. I’ve been rewatching The Office. I’ve just started The Day of the Jackal.

I don’t recall what movies I’ve watched. I need to start writing down what I’ve watched. I haven’t gone to a theater, so I haven’t seen anything truly new. I’m not sure what I’d say my favorite of the year has been.

The early part of this year may end up being a bit chaotic, as I’ll be house hunting and then moving again. I have this apartment until early May, so I really hope I find something by then. I’d said I wanted to experience at least part of a winter before I make the decision to buy a house, but even though it’s colder than I’m used to (and I need warmer clothes), I can’t think of any other place I’d prefer to live. This area really seems to be a Goldilocks zone for me, just right on the metrics that matter to me. I would like to meet more people, and I’m gradually getting involved in the community. I think getting permanently settled will help.

I normally set outcome goals for each quarter of things I want to accomplish, but for work I’m going to be focusing on behavior and dedicating a certain amount of time each day to my main work tasks. That should lead to some outcomes, and once I’ve established the habit (or re-established, since that was what I generally did before the move disrupted everything), then I can worry more about outcomes. I’m also trying to get back into some exercise habits. That should be easier once I have a house. I don’t really have good space for yoga (I have to adjust to fit in some of the exercises without bumping into things), and the place is too small to get in steps just moving around. But I do get a fair amount of walking just going around town, since I can walk downtown. I walk to the library, to church, to the farmer’s market, to the bank, and to concerts and other events. I live near the top of a very steep hill, so walking anywhere involves some climbing to get home, and since I’m on the other side of the hill from downtown, I have to walk up first before I walk down the hill to town, so it’s literally uphill both ways.

Speaking of walking, I have to get to the library to pick up a book while it’s still above freezing and before it starts snowing.

Books

Bad Choice

I learned this week that I need to be a lot more careful when I’m selecting books at the library.

It’s the time of year when I want to read moderately Christmassy rom-coms/chick-lit/women’s fiction. Not necessarily an all-out “Christmas” book, but a book that happens to be set around the holiday season. That makes them tricky to find. If it’s not mentioned on the cover, I have to flip through it and see if any particular keywords pop out. It’s especially helpful if there’s some kind of date to start each chapter.

On my last library trip, I found one that I thought might work. It was in the “unhappy wife wanting a different life” category, and I tend to prefer single woman stories to either “unhappy wife” or “wife discovers that her perfect life isn’t perfect when her husband dumps her” stories, but I didn’t have time to do a serious search in the library, and the storyline sounded interesting. A flip through caught a mention of Christmas. The cover was cartoony, suggesting comedy. So I checked it out.

I should have also read the marketing blurbs above the book description. I tend to skip those because I don’t want the publisher telling me that a book is “unputdownable,” “heartwarming,” or “hilarious.” However, it would have been a clue that they used the word “sinister.”

It turned out that this was not a quirky chick lit/women’s fiction. It’s a psychological thriller—a quirky one using a lot of women’s fiction/chick lit tropes, but it’s still about a woman who becomes obsessed with a serial killer to the point she ends up institutionalized (that’s in the prologue, then the book is about how she ended up there). The Christmas mentions were in a chapter of her in the institution (the book switches back and forth between the present and the past), comparing life there to Christmas afternoon, with the staff bringing out puzzles and games with the kind of forced cheer a mom has on Christmas afternoon when she’s trying to keep everyone together and in good spirits with lots of activities. My quick glance had shown me multiple uses of the word “Christmas” and the mention of a mother bringing out puzzles and games. I missed that it was an analogy, and a fairly dark one at that, since the Christmases the narrator was remembering were tense and unhappy.

That’s not exactly the fluffy holiday read I was hoping for. Yikes! I guess I should read the marketing stuff. I may or may not agree with whether a book is “unputdownable” or “hilarious,” but I do want to know whether the publisher considers the book “sinister” rather than “heartwarming.”

I have now done some research and found a couple of books that might fit the bill, and I’ve requested them from the library, and I checked out an e-book for the time being. This weekend will be busy, but I’m hoping to finish the draft I’m working on early next week, and then I will have some time to sit, listen to Christmas music, drink hot cocoa, and read, and I’ll have proper reading material for that.

Now I kind of want to write the book I thought this one would be. It’s the kind of concept that could either be quirky and funny or sinister, depending on how it’s handled, and I want to do the funny version. I’ll add it to the idea file.

fantasy, Books

Romantasy vs. Fantasy

The book draft I recently finished is something I’m hoping will fit the current trend for “romantasy,” or romantic fantasy, but I’m still not really sure what they’re looking for there. Earlier in the year, I saw an online panel of editors working on romantasy and asked just what they’re looking for in the romance part of it — can it be just vibes and the sense that the couple will get together (maybe later in a series) or is it a full-on romance novel that happens to be set in a fantasy world? One of the editors, who’s heading an actual “romantasy” imprint and who came from the romance side of things, said she want’s a full-on romance, while another editor said she was fine with just vibes.

If it’s supposed to be a romance, then that generally means a Happily Ever After (they’re definitely together as a couple at the end of the book and have made some kind of commitment), the main conflict in the story is between the couple, and if you remove the romance, the story doesn’t work. That’s different from a fantasy with romance in it, in which the romance happens along the way as all the plot stuff happens. The couple may or may not be together at the end. If it’s a series, it may take multiple books for them to definitely be together. There may not even be a conflict between the members of the couple. They may get along pretty well and just have a development from strangers to colleagues to friends to lovers, and the main thing keeping them apart is the plot situation — it’s hard to have a happily ever after when there’s still that dark wizard to vanquish. If you removed the romance you’d still have a story. It’s an accent to the story rather than the core.

Well, when I read a book from the designated romantasy imprint, I found that it actually wasn’t as romancey as the editor made it sound. There was a complete romance with a happy ending in the story, but you could have removed the romance and still had a story that worked. There was some conflict between the hero and heroine, but most of it was one-sided, with the hero unknowingly pushing the heroine’s buttons and getting on her nerves until she realized she needed to handle things differently.

I’ve actually seen things that come closer to being “romance” that were published before the current romantasy trend. I just finished reading that Twelve Houses series by Sharon Shinn, and I think you could remove the romances from the first couple of books and still have a story, though the romances upped the stakes and were pivotal for the character arcs. In the second two books, the romance was more pivotal. Most of the plots wouldn’t have happened if the romances hadn’t been there because they had a lot to do with the characters doing the things that were critical for the plots.

As a reader, I find that I don’t engage as much with a fantasy book that doesn’t have any love story in it. I like figuring out who’s going to get together and if they will, and I like it if a lot of the character growth comes through the relationship — where they make each other better people. But I don’t really like a full-on romance that focuses on the relationship. I like the relationship to happen along the way as other stuff happens.

I’m still not sure if that book I’ve been working on fits. It doesn’t really have a strong romantic happy ending. It mostly ends with them having an awareness that there are feelings there, and that will develop in the next book. And yet, there wouldn’t be much of a story if you removed the romantic elements because romance has a lot to do with the characters’ motivations at each of the major turning points. It has much more romance than the first Enchanted, Inc. book, which a lot of readers (and editors) saw as very romantic.

I guess all I can do is write it as well as I can and see what happens. If publishers don’t want it, I’ll just independently publish it and let readers decide.

Books

More Cozy Cottagecore Fantasy

If you like my Rydding Village books and need something to keep you entertained while I write book 3 (you’ve already read book 2, right?), I have a recommendation for you: The Spellshop, by Sarah Beth Durst. I’ve known Sarah a really long time. I think we first met in 2006, and we’ve hung out together when we’re at the same events, bonding over curly hair and fantasy books. As soon as she started talking about this book, I was excited. It’s along the same lines as the Rydding Village books, in that it’s cottagecore cozy fantasy about a woman finding refuge in a magical village.

An extremely introverted librarian packs up as many books as she can and flees when a revolution sets the city and the library on fire. The only place she can think of to go for refuge is her childhood home on a remote island. She initially plans to just keep the spellbooks safe, since unauthorized use of magic is absolutely forbidden, but when she learns that the people on the island are suffering because the sorcerers who were supposed to be visiting to take care of things haven’t been, she starts looking up spells she can use to help. She can sell “remedies” to help the islanders, including the handsome merhorse farmer next door. She’s safe as long as no outsiders come to the island, but then a storm blows in a refugee who could put everything at risk.

This is a sweet, charming book about community that also gets into issues dealing with resources and how they should be fairly allocated, as well as questions about the difference between what’s right and what’s legal. There’s a subtle, gentle romance, but it’s mostly about the loner heroine learning to allow herself to be part of a community and to open her heart and explore her abilities. It’s like one of those women’s fiction books about the woman going to a village and opening a bakery/cafe/candy shop/bookstore, only in a magical world with flying cats, sentient spider plants, tree spirits, and merhorses.

It certainly makes me look at my spider plant differently, and I feel a little sad about having to rehome the giant granddaddy one when I moved. The one danger of reading this as a follow-up to Bread and Burglary might be that you’d be even hungrier, as there’s a lot of talk about jam and baked goods.

Books

New Library Benefits

One fun thing about the move is that now I have access to two local library systems, and they have different books from my old library system. Late last year, I read Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn, the start of a series, but my library system didn’t have the second book. I tried requesting it through Interlibrary Loan, but something must have gone wrong because even though several library systems in the metro area had it, they never got it in for me. But the library here did have it, so I finally got to read book 2, The Thirteenth House.

This series is structured somewhat like a romance series, with it being about a group of people, and each book has a different person from within the group as a main character. There’s also a different romance in each book. There’s an overarching plot about some political turmoil in the kingdom that this group is helping the king deal with, but this book could still function as a standalone. I barely remembered the first book, it’s been so long since I read it, and I was able to follow the story. It’s the sort of thing where you could follow the plot if you hadn’t read the earlier book, but you’d grasp more about the characters and situation if you had.

This book centers on the young noblewoman who has shapeshifting powers, and even though this seems to be a somewhat medieval-ish fantasy world (medieval technology, but it otherwise doesn’t seem to be pinned to any particular era from our history), this particular book has a very Regency vibe. It’s the social season, in which the nobles of the elite Twelve Houses of the kingdom each host big house parties and balls for the other nobles, who make the circuit of them all, along with some of the upper lesser nobles in each province, known collectively as the Thirteenth House. Our heroine is using her shapechanging abilities to impersonate her introverted sister and attend the social functions on her behalf. Meanwhile, the other members of the group are guarding the young princess, who’s making her big social debut. There are rumblings of threats from disgruntled lesser nobles, and the regent who would advise the princess if she became queen has been threatened. What complicates things for our heroine is the fact that she fell in love with this regent, and he with her, when she rescued him from kidnappers. The only problem is that he’s married. She’s never worried about social conventions before, but is this a social convention she’s willing to break? And if she does, could she lose out on another possible love?

This book is less of a “fantasy road trip” than the first one in the series, since they aren’t really on a quest, but they are on a journey as they travel around the kingdom. It’s fun seeing a lot of the conventions of the Regency romance placed in a magical world. The romance in this one is not one that could fit into a genre romance novel, and it provides an angsty contrast to the Regency-like fun in the rest of the plot. Romance readers might have issues with the relationship, but I would encourage you not to judge it without reading the whole book because it does work out in a satisfying way for the character, and there are some twists.

I really enjoy this kind of series structure, with the big-picture external plot that carries through the whole series and the individual romance plots in each book. We get to see the world and the characters through different eyes in each book since there’s a different protagonist. The main characters from the first book are secondary characters here, and we get to see how they’re progressing. Meanwhile, potential storylines are being set up for the other characters that I assume will play out in future books. This is what I’m trying to do with the Rydding Village series, though I’m sort of keeping Elwyn as a secondary heroine in all the books, so there’s the book heroine and then there’s Elwyn as the series heroine, and we’ll get both their perspectives in each book. The big picture plot will start to have a bigger effect starting in book three, which I’m gearing up to start writing.