Living the Fictional Dream

I want to write a sequel to “The Widow and the Stranger” (Allegory e-zine, May 2008 issue). I love Sarah Kirby, and I want to write about another of her adventures. I like that she’s reserved and old fashioned, but at the same time she’s a liberated feminist.

When my writing group did the Story Every Day contest back in June, I actually wrote a sequel to tWatS, but it was too much of a sequel. It relied heavily on background that someone would only know if they read the first one. One of Jadon’s enemies tried to steal the amulet that he made for Sarah in an attempt to find him.

Sadly, while that might be interesting if I ever wrote a novel about Sarah and her Atlantians, it wasn’t going to work for a short story. Maybe if the same e-zine published it, but you can’t count on that. And even still, in the short story game, each story really needs to stand on its own. The characters can have more adventures, but they shouldn’t have continuing adventures (unless you’re lucky enough to have the chance to publish a short story collection like Mercedes Lackey’s Tarma and Kethry stories or perhaps if you have a market that’s committed to publishing them all).

Recently, I wrote a few paragraphs of the next Sarah Kirby story. The title popped into my head fully formed, and I actually kind of like it — “The Widow and the Lord” — it stands on it’s own, and yet it still harkens back to the predecessor for those “in the know.”

Sadly, that’s as far as it’s gone. I have a good setting and a new character for Sarah to interact with (and bring her common sense business acumen to), but I have no plot! Don’t you hate that? Great concept/idea/character, and no plot. I know that romance is the wrong way to go — Sarah had enough of that last time, and she’s not a woman who opens herself up that easily. So, I need a plot with a speculative twist to involve Sarah in the life of this lord. I want her to somehow save the day this time in a decisive way. But… how? Nothing is coming to mind.

Ah well… I guess I will just have to let “The Widow and the Lord” linger for a while. Perhaps one day, out of the blue, the plot will come to me like the title did. It’s strange, though. Usually I suffer through the title creation process. I never start with a title! Weirdness!

Yesterday, I got the proofs for my story, “Bridge Club,” that will come out in the October issue of A Thousand Faces. I spent a few minutes reading the story all over again. It was actually more enjoyable reading it with a little distance between myself and it. A little like reading something new.

A lot of times, after a write a story, I grow to hate it. I guess it depends on how much time has passed since the writing, but after a while, I just can’t stand those old stories any more. Maybe it’s because of my growth as a writer, or maybe it’s just my hyper inner critic (I notice a lot of writers have one of those!), but it tends to happen. But “Bridge Club,” I still really like. (The same with “The Widow and the Stranger” — I don’t get tired of that one, as far as my own stories go.)

Anyway, back to my original topic, I love getting the proofs for a story that’s been accepted. It turns a nebulous acceptance into something real and concrete, like the story is actually going to happen. I’ve had around a dozen stories accepted now, and it never gets to be old hat. Maybe it’s not quite as earthshattering as it was the first couple of times, but I still get that “squee” feeling when the acceptance comes in the in-box. It’s not why I write, but it is why I send stuff out on submission — well, that and the “squee” that comes when I talk to other people who’ve actually read the stories.

I currently have three stories coming out this fall and a fourth slated to come out next March, so that should be a nice line-up of sqeeage for the upcoming months. As always, you can read about it here when they are available for public consumption!

Before I wind things up, I just want to shout out a quick congratulations to my writing group mate, Jens, who just had a story accepted by Every Day Fiction, too. It’s a quirky little piece staring his 19th century steampunk adventuring duo Blankenship and Dawes called “Chrono-Conundrum.” I’ll definitely link to that one here when it’s available.

Happy Friday, all! Here’s hoping we all get some good writing done over this holiday weekend!

My week has been balanced out writing-wise. I got two rejections (one from the market that had passed my story to round 2 **sighs**), but then yesterday I had a story accepted by Every Day Fiction. This will be my second with them, so I’m excited! I’ll post the link here when it comes out — I don’t know the date yet.

So, to continue on my topic from yesterday, plots or types of stories that I don’t like, I thought I would put together a few thoughts about plots that I do like. Everyone probably has these… those story premises that suck you in every time. Sometimes, I think of these as guilty pleasure stories, because I usually enjoy them even if the writing isn’t top notch.

One of these for me is the story where two people pretend to be a couple for some at least slightly nefarious purpose and then actually fall in love during the con. One example of that is the movie Drive Me Crazy, and it’s a teen movie, too, so it has that Y/A factor that I love. But this concept has been done all over the place — in books, TV shows, etc. — and I always love it! The thing is, though it’s a simple concept, there are millions of ways it can be done. Just because, boiled down, the premise is the same, each story is totally different.

Vampire and werewolf fiction is another one for me. I love the urban fantasy/supernatural feel to these creatures. I love that they are human and “other” at the same time. I like them with the traditional tropes (silver bullets, wooden stakes, no reflection), and I love it when writers give them their own twist (like the werewolves in Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld and the vampires in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight). I used to devour these any time I found them because they were rare. With the current urban fantasy explosion, there are a lot more to pick and choose from, which is great, because I can always find something new to read.

I also love it when two characters who seem to be diametrically opposed (by a point of view, by temperment, by class, by family, whatever) form a really strong relationship. Romantic relationships of this sort abound — think Veronica/Logan on Veronica Mars, the main couple in Pretty in Pink, or even Romeo and Juliet (though, I prefer the ones that end more happily!). But the relationship doesn’t always have to be a romance. A friendship that opposes these lines can be just as fascinating. In this story, it’s all about the depth of the relationship, the connections forged, the sacrifices made, and the ways the characters’ eyes are opened.

I’m also a sucker for a story about a scoundrel/rebel. A character who lives his/her life in shades of gray is inherently more interesting than a black-and-white hero. Give me the Han Solos (Star Wars), the Mals (Firefly), the Deans (Supernatural), the Sawyers (Lost), the Faiths (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the Jos (Little Women), and the Dr. Horribles (Dr. Horrible, of course) any day! I like to see the struggle between right and wrong, and when they choose the right thing over the selfish thing, the reward is so much sweeter. These characters might think they have it easy, but in reality they struggle more than any of the more black-and-white versions.

If I thought for a while, I’m sure I’d come up with more tropes/stories/plots that I have a weakness for, but that’s probably a long enough list for now. What about y’all? What concepts have you buying the book/turning on the TV without knowing anything else about the end product?

Yesterday, I stumbled across the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead on the Sci-fi channel — the movie about survivors of the zombie apocalypse hiding out in a mall. Now, I enjoy a good scary movie. Loved Scream, love Supernatural (even when those creepy ghost stories give me the willies), even have been known to enjoy a slasher flick from time to time (the Halloween and Friday the 13th variety, not the new ones, like Saw, that are all about pain and torture with no good guy to win in the end — or so I’ve heard). But after watching DotD yesterday (really only the last half… starting when the zombie baby was born), I spent half the night having insomnia and thinking about the movie and the other half of the night dreaming about my own zombie apocolpyse (the strange thing was, I dreamed the same dream twice, and the second time, I knew I’d done this before, but even still I wasn’t able to save my friends from their zombie-fied doom!).

I think it was the depressing ending that did it to me. (Spoiler alert, in case you care!) If we’d ended with our four survivors on the boat, sailing away to a deserted island and some kind of meager life, I would probably have been OK, even after my favorite guy was bitten in the last reel and had to stay behind and shoot himself. At least some of our good guys would have gotten away, won the day (sort of). But the depressing clips during the credits of the boat runing out of gas, the engine catching on fire, and them fining coming up on an island — their last chance — to then find it infested by zombies, as well. Man… suckage! So… what was even the point of the movie, you know?

The whole thing got me thinking about stories that I just don’t like. And high on that list is stories that end badly. Now, I’m not saying that I always want a happy ending or a silver lining, because that’s not true. There are stories that really need to have an unhappy ending — such an ending is true to the story. Take Memento, for example. That is a really well done movie, and one that everyone should see, but a happy ending just wasn’t in the cards from the get-go. For me, it’s the total destruction, everything’s lost including the characters you spent the last two hours growing to care about, ending that gets me. When I watch a scary movie, I want there to be a ray of hope at the end. I want the bad guy to ultimately be defeated by the last survivor or the group of survivors to get away to fight another day.

Another type of story that is hard for me is a war story — a dramatization of a real war that we fought in our histories, like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor, to name a couple of recent ones that I actually watched. The invasion of Normandy sequence at the beginning of SPR tore me up inside when I watched it, as did the battle aftermath sequence in PH. I wasn’t a fan of the silly PH love triangle and all the rest of it, but that scene where the nurse has to sort through the bodies and mark the ones who have a chance of being helped in triage vs. the ones with no chance (condemning them to death), is so painful. The semi-blurry way it portrays the scene interspersed with images of clarity… I think that’s exactly how one would remember such a thing.

After a while, I realized that the reason I don’t like these movies is because they are too realistic. As in, humans actually did these things to each other — they killed each other at Normandy and at Pearl Harbor, and so many other times. The fact that one human can do that to another, no matter what the larger stakes are, crushes my soul a little bit. But, I do see the value of war movies, too — if we are going to be that cruel to other humans, we should remember that they are human just as we are.

And another thing that, as a consumer of stories, I can’t take sometimes is stories where people are intentionally cruel to each other emotionally. Now, this one is less of an issue than the other two, because sometimes these plot elements can be done in a way that I don’t mind as much, but, to really like the story, I have to have, again, some element of hope to counterbalance or some character that I can really root for. When all the characters are cruel to each other all of the time, there’s just not much for me to sink my teeth into. For example, the constant manipulations of Cruel Intentions/Dangerous Liasons are intriguing on one level, but also excruciatingly painful, so those movies are not on the top of my list. I had to give up watching Desperate Housewives midway into the first half of the first season because the bad stuff that they did to their families (at that point in the series anyway) so outweighed the good. My last straw was when one of the housewives took her mother-in-law, a recovering gambling addict, and intentionally left her within the grasp of a casino’s temptations for her own selfish gain.

Anyway, this entry is getting to be quite a ramblefest, so I should wind things up. I guess the whole reason for writing this today was that, after my troubled sleep last night, I was thinking about the kinds of stories that I like and the kinds that I just don’t. This kind of preference definitely affects one’s writing style, I think. You’re not going to see me writing a war story any time soon, and though sometimes my stories don’t end happily, they aren’t going to end it total destruction without some note of hope — those are things you can expect from me as a writer, because they are things that I want as a reader.

What about you guys out there? Are there any kinds of stories that just don’t work for you? Stories that you avoid from either a reading/watching or writing perspective?

I finished watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night (the day after they came out on DVD), and man, this is a really good series! If any of y’all like sci-fi and/or the Terminator movies, you should definitely check this series out!

First of all, the series rocks at continuity. In a world with such complex plotting, it’s amazing how many details they remember. Of course, they made movie 3 obsolete, but no one saw that one anyway, right? And it supposedly sucked (though I actually never saw it, so I can’t say). But, since this is a time travel concept, even rewriting history (or, perhaps future history?) makes sense in the ‘verse.

Second, this series has great characters, and, to me, characters are the most important part of any story. I suppose, on a basic level, the SCC characters are basic sci-fi trope. We have a robot struggling with what it means to be human. There’s an angsty teen who is supposed to grow up to be the “chosen one” (though, not a mystical choosing, like with Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Harry Potter). There’s a lioness mother struggling to protect her cub, a law enforcement agent who is against us right now but might become our friend in the end, and an embittered soldier in mourning for a lost loved one.

But SCC takes these standard characters and gives them all a fresh feel. Sarah kicks butt and takes names, which is awesome, and yet, she doesn’t like to kill. Derek has a grudge against terminators and possibly a death wish, but there’s a surprising soft side. He’s had some great moments with John, and when he teared up watching Cameron dance… great acting! Cameron has more depth than either Data or the Voyager holographic doctor had at the beginning of the series. She is a strange combination of mystery (what is she doing? whose side is she on?), humanity (feeling like making conversation is the thing to do, appreciating ballet), and machine (killing or allowing humans to die). And John, while he has those whiney teenaged moments, he often surpases them, and that future greatness glimmers underneath all the while.

These characters really do make SCC a great show. Anyone can take an element and tell a story about it — the thing is to give those elements their own skins, their own personalities. It’s the trappings that make a story unique, because there are only so many plots out there in the world. It’s a testiment to the series that it’s this good and, really, it has nearly the same plot (at least at a concept level) as the second movie!

And, of course, I love a show where female characters get to be strong fighters. That always rocks! If you haven’t watched this show yet, if you can get your hands on the DVDs, you should definitely give it a try. The first season was only nine episodes thanks to the writers’ strike, so you can even watch it now and be done in time for the 9/9/08 premier of season two!

I got an email today that a magazine I’ve always wanted to get into moved my submission from round 1 to round 2. There are 3 rounds total, so cross your fingers for me!

So, based on my data-gathering software, in the past month, this blog has had visitors from quite a few of these United States and several other countries. The bulk of my traffic is from Texas, which makes sense because I live in Texas, but there have been significant hits from places where I’ve never even been and didn’t know I had any friends, like Spain and Minnesota.

If you read my blog and you’ve never commented, I’d love it if you stopped and said hello! I’d love to meet you, even in a virtual sense. And if you have blogs of your own, definitely link them.

Also, as I brainstorm for content lately, I’ve been wondering what my dear readers enjoy the most. Book reviews? Links posts? Insider comments on my writing? Ruminations on aspects of writing in general? My thoughts on and links to more informed thoughts on the publishing industry? Links to good stories out there? Writing group stuff? Nonwriting stuff? Anything else?

This is your chance to let me know what your favorite topics are, and I’ll definitely keep all comments in mind going forward!

And if anything comes to mind that you’d be interested in seeing as a new feature or topic, let me know. I’ve been toying with the idea of putting some of my fiction up on the blog, but that can be a little dicey. A lot of markets consider stories posted on a personal blog as “published,” and that limits where you can send your stories. However, I’m getting to the point where some of my stories that are already out there are hitting the end of the exclusivity clauses. I might be able to publish some of those here as reprints. Though, since most of those were available online, perhaps that would be a mite silly. You can always get to the ones that are still available out there via the link on my “Erin’s Stories” page.

Have a great day, everyone!

Today is a dreary Monday in Texas — humid and raining. On the up-side, at least the overcast skies mean it isn’t 100+ degrees outside!

Days like this are perfect for sitting at home curled up in one’s jammies, and the best activities for those times are reading a good book or writing a story. Sadly, I haven’t been able to do either today. Too much work to do! My company’s busy season gears up around August and lasts through November or so. If my updates around here are less frequent in the next few months, that’s the reason why. Never fear, though! There will still be updates.

I don’t have any particular writing news to impart at the moment. I have several stories in the revision queue and several stories for others in my crit queue, just waiting for me to find the time to work on them between all this work-work. I was out of town this weekend. Spending time with old friends is relaxing and refreshing.

If you’d like to read an actual blog on a writing-related topic, check out this post on Jen’s blog. It’s my guest blog spot — a column about young adult fiction. Sadly, the HTML tags that I handily put in the file for him so he didn’t have to worry about things like linking and italics, do not appear to have worked like they do on my blog, and have come across as text instead of as links or formatting. So, the column looks a little wonky, but hopefully it will be enjoyable just the same.

Have a great Monday, everyone, and if it’s raining where you are, try not to get too damp!

The Summoning is a new young adult novel by one of my favorite adult urban fantasy authors, Kelley Armstrong. There are mild spoilers in this review, so if you’d rather stay pure you might wait until later to read this, but I’m not going too deep. The spoilers are more about the premise and set-up, not about the ending.

The Summoning takes place in Armstrong’s Otherworld universe, which includes witches, warlocks, werewolves, vampires, shamans, half-demons, and necromancer. In fact, I reviewed the most recent paperback in her adult Otherworld series, No Humans Allowed, earlier this summer. The Summoning, however, takes a different approach, asking what would happen if someone had one of these powers and had never heard of the supernatural world.

Chloe sees a dead janitor walking the halls at school one day, freaks out (who wouldn’t?!), and manages to get herself sent to a groups home for emotionally troubled teens, earning herself a diagnosis of schizophrenia. But, while she’s at this home, she discovers that she’s not the only one with strange talents, and that’s when things start to get interesting.

Overall, I enjoyed this book very much. The characters are great, especially Chloe and Derek, and the premise is interesting. I also love how Armstrong takes her Otherworld universe and goes somewhere completely new with it. She could have made a Y/A series based on Savannah — a teen character in her adult series — but, instead, she breaks new ground and gives us a whole new mystery to chew on.

I also like the dynamics between the characters. Angst and drama is part and parcel of merely being a teenager. Add to that supernatural problems and the possibility of more going on than meets the eye with the adults in your life, and things get interesting really quickly.

But, I was very disappointed in one element of The Summoning, the ending. I have the same complaint about this novel as I mentioned when talking about Meg Cabot’s Airhead in this post: there’s no ending, the book just stops. And that really drives me nuts!

The worst part was, I totally wasn’t expecting it from Armstrong. The beauty of the adult books in the Otherworld series is that they are complete. There are overarching character struggles that carry over, but each novel has its own mystery that is solved by the end. You have closure. But The Summoning does not.

According to Armstrong’s website, Chloe’s story will be a trilogy. I’m glad to know that, because now I know that I will get the closure eventually; however, if I’d known this up front, I would have waited to read the novels until all three had been released. I hate going into a book thinking one thing, and then, surprise, having to wait until a later book release (months or years away) for any closure. There should be warning labels right up front! I’m even OK with elements that carry over, but I just want some closure on some of the levels, and The Summoning does not deliver on that regard. We end with Chloe… well, I guess I won’t give that away, but suffice to say that all is not well for her at the end of the novel.

However, if that’s not the kind of thing that bothers you, then I would definitely recommend this book, both for Y/A readers and for people who’ve enjoyed Armstrong’s other books. It’s really well written and an enjoyable read. But if you have issues with lack of closure, you should wait to dive in until the trilogy is complete.

This article is a list of publishing terms. Some of them I knew from my day job (we publish reference materials), but some of them were new on me.