Living the Fictional Dream

Some members of my writing group have been having an exciting time of it this month. Stephanie has been inspired by her April Fool challenge, and she’s in the running to win the monthly prompt-writing contest (I’m facilitating this month). Talk about a great way to get your butt in the chair for some regular writing — challenge yourself to write a story every day for a month (and then actually follow through).

But, Stephanie has some serious competition from fellow writing group mate, Sandra, who blasted in out of nowhere to tie Stephanie for first place. They have until midnight tonight to break the tie, otherwise, the winner is the person with the highest word count.

Makes me happy to see all this writing. And hopefully we’ll see some short stories and flashes by both Stephanie and Sandra out in the world sometime soon. As the facilitator, I read all the prompts as they are submitted, and these girls have put out some quality writing this month. A few revisions, and they should have some great stuff.

Congrats, girls!

Over the weekend, I started reading the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries by Charlaine Harris. (These are the books upon which the HBO TV show True Blood is based, but I think the books are better than the show — different, but in a good way.)

I won’t do an in-depth book review on the series right now, as I’m still in the midst of reading it. However, this series really has me thinking about one thing writing-wise, and I wanted to get some thoughts about that down while they are still fresh.

Reading this series, really got me thinking about what makes a good character.

It’s fairly inevitable that the Sookie Stackhouse series would get compared to the Anita Blake series written by Laurel K. Hamilton. They are both urban fantasy. Both include significant vampire and werewolf/shape shipfter action. Both involve vampires “coming out” as legal citizens of the United States. Both have strong female protagonists with supernatural abilities of their own, and both women have significant romantic relationships with other supernaturals over the course of the series.

Despite all these similarities, I find myself heartily preferring the Sookie Stackhouse books to the Anita Blake books — both the books themselves and the heroine. I started asking myself why this was, and when it gets down to it, it’s all about the main character. (There will be some points in this post that would be considered spoilerish if you have not read the series, but I’ll try not to get too specific.)

I read a lot of the Anita Blake books when I first discovered the series, and I really enjoyed it at first. However, as the series continued, my enjoyment in it began to wane. The focus of the series seemed to me to shift in a direction that just wasn’t to my personal taste. Even if you have not read the Anita Blake series, you may have heard it described as “erotic” or “sexy.” At the beginning, though there was a lot of sexual tension and romance, it wasn’t the focus — the focus was more on the plots and mysteries, as well as on Anita’s life. But, by the point where I finally gave up the series, it felt to me like the plot in the books was merely an excuse to allow Anita to have crazy supernatural sex with a huge harem of guys — the love triangle beween Anita, vampire Jean-Claude, and werewolfe Richard widened to include more vampires, more shifters (especially the werepanthers), and others.

My other problem came with Anita herself. Over the course of the novels (I gave up the series after reading Narcissus in Chains), she became more and more powerful — to, what seemed to me, an absurd degree. In the beginning, Anita was a normal woman who just happened to be an necromancer. She also had trained herself physically to be a vampire hunter. As the series went on, she gathered more and more powers and titles to add to her burgeoning collection — lupa of the werewolf pack, part of a triumverate of power with Jean Claude and Richard, alpha of the werepanther pack, etc., etc. And then she suddenly developed Jean Claude’s talent of drawing energy from sex (and getting weaker if she didn’t get said sex), which made things even crazier for her personally and for her huge amount of powers.

I liked Anita when she was a normal person with one significant power and some skills that she’d trained into herself by working hard. I didn’t like it when suddenly she was all-powerful.

Sookie Stackhouse starts out her series similar to Anita (I’m currently in the middle of Definitely Dead). She’s a normal girl, a barmaid in a restaurant, but she has one supernatural power to deal with. She’s a telepath. Then she meets Bill the vampire and discovers that she can’t read vampire minds — she is immediately intrigued because it is restful for her to be around Bill — she doesn’t constantly have to fight against being bombarded by stray thoughts.

Through her association with Bill, Sookie is introduced to the supernatural world (both the world of the recently legalized vampires and still underground supernatural creatures, like Weres, shifters, and fairies), and becomes embroiled in supernatural affairs.

Like Anita, Sookie is given some enhanced powers — the difference is, they don’t last. In Sookie’s world, humans gain power from drinking vampire blood — it enhances their strength and speed, their looks, and other abilities. However, the effect is temporary, based on how much she’s had and how old the vampire in question was. So, she has these abilities, but only for a while. Other than that, she never adds to her supernatural skills, though, over time, she does learn how to control her telepathy better and use it in new (and believable) ways, such as projecting thoughts to other telepaths (but not to regular Joes).

Also like Anita, Sookie becomes greatly in demand in the supernatural world. However, unlike Anita, the supernatural world doesn’t fall at Sookie’s feet. She’s dragged into it (or sometimes rushes into it head first), but she has to work for the acceptance that she gets there (and she is not always accepted).

For example, Sookie meets a werewolf named Alcide and they are attracted to each other. However, (1) they do not hop immediately into bed together and (2) Sookie does not gain any type of leadership position in his pack. She is named a “friend of the pack,” but that is because she alerts them to a problem in their territory and helps out a pack member who gets hit by a car. In fact, despite dancing around the issue for a couple of books, Sookie and Alcide never actually have a relationship. They are interested in each other, but each has a load of personal baggage (in the form of exes and other issues) that gets in the way, and the relationship is never even consumated.

Sookie does have a relationship with vampire Bill, and a couple of other supernatural guys are interested in her, but the interest is believable. I never wonder why all the guys are so taken with Sookie (like I did with Anita), and there are plenty of guys in the series who aren’t actually taken with her. Also, every supernatural guy Sookie meets does not automatically become her bedmate.

The difference between Antia and Sookie, I’ve decided, is the Mary Sue phenomenon. If you haven’t heard of a Mary Sue, this is a term that came from fanfiction writers. A Mary Sue is a character written into a story about an existing universe (Buffy the Vampire Slayer was always my fanfiction neighborhood of choice) who basically represents the author’s wish fullfillment. This character is instantly loved and embraced by the main characters of the existing universe — all the guys fall for her and all the girls want to be her best friend. Everything a Mary Sue does comes easy for him/her, and she gets everything that she wants in the end. And any “weakness” a Mary Sue has is usually a strength in disguise and never gives her much trouble.

As the series progressed, Anita felt more and more to me like a Mary Sue. Everything came too easily for her, too many guys liked her (without enough reason) and liked her so much that she was able to treat them like crap and they would still give her whatever she wanted. Her powers got exponentially stronger to an insane degree, and even her weaknesses just don’t seem that bad.

Sookie, however, doesn’t feel like a Mary Sue to me. She feels like a real, vibrant character of her own accord. She’s strong, but she has real weaknesses. She might have a selection of cute guys to be interested in, but she doesn’t get to have all of them. And the relationshpis she does have include real life issues and don’t always work out. She also has issues in her life that don’t magically get solved — like money problems, problems with her brother, and problems with the law. Sometimes she will find ways around them — like earning a significant sum of money using her house as a hide-out for a vampire on the run — but inevitably something will happen to set things back again — like a house fire resulting in a huge expenditure setting her finances back to ground zero.

The writing lesson I’m taking away from all this debate is a reminder of just how important characters are to a story. Without characters the reader can really invest in, they are more likely to stop reading (like I did with Anita Blake, whom I could no longer relate to). But a character a reader really likes becomes an old friend that they want to visit in every subsequent novel (like Sookie is for me — at least so far, I’ve got a few more books left to read).

Part of making characters that readers will like and identify with, in my opinion, is being willing to be hard on them. They need real obstacles to overcome. You can’t be too easy on your characters or there is no real struggle for them to go through and suddenly your character is a Mary Sue.

When I first started writing, I was way too nice to my characters, and the stories suffered for it. I still struggle with that, but I’m becoming much less benevolent to my characters as I mature as a writer.

If you enjoy urban fantasy and murder mysteries, I would definitely give the Sookie Stackhouse novels a chance. And if you like True Blood, I think that you’ll enjoy the books, as well.

Happy reading, watching, and writing, y’all!

Last night, I woke up several times (not unusual — pregnancy is heck on the middle of the night bathroom runs — preparation for midnight feedings, perhaps?), and as I crawled back into bed and tried to coax sleep back into the room, I started imagining a story. The opening scene is there, fully formed, in my mind. I was too tired to get up and type it out last night (plus, my laptop battery was low), but I still remember it in detail this morning.

I will have to work on it on my lunch break today or maybe tonight when I get home. I need to get that opening written down before it eludes me.

Of course, once the opening is written, then I’ll actually have to figure out a plot for this story. I have a character, a setting, and a genre, but I’m not sure why in the world this girl is doing what she’s doing.

Isn’t writing fun?

The Sword & Sorceress market has opened again. Another anthology of sword and sorcery stories with strong female protagonists. I really love the idea of this anthology. I like fantasy, I especially like fantasy with strong female protagonists, and I enjoy a good action story (if it is well-written and has more than just action to sweeten the story).

This is one of those markets that it would be a dream to be included in. As such, I probably never will be, LOL! Seriously, this is a really tough market. I have submitted several stories to them in the past couple of years and gotten the form rejection every time. Not even good enough for a personal comment! Some of my writing group mates have submitted as well, and none of us have gotten a nibble. Competition at the professional level is killer.

Last year, while on vacation, my husband had me reading a series of short stories about two characters named Tarma and Kethry. These stories were some of the first works published by Mercedes Lackey, and I believe they first came to light in a S&S anthology or some other of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s publications. While reading them, I was really struck by the difference between publishing now and publishing back when these stories first came out (I think it was in the 1970s, if I remember correctly, but I’m lazy and not looking it up, so don’t hold me to that!).

In these stories, Tarma is a female warrier. All of her tribe is slaughtered by her, so she swears herself to the warrier goddess, takes a vow of chastity, and devotes herself to getting vengeance for her tribe. After that is complete, she devotes herself to helping women in trouble who have no one else to save them.

By Tarma’s side is Kethry, a sorceress of astonishing power who has a magic sword that can lead them to other women who are in trouble. The pair forge a solid and real friendship and spend their lives saving the world together — both on their own and as part of a mercenary fighting garrison. Kethry’s children help Tarma re-start her lost tribe among the horse people, and in their later years they run a school to train both boys and girls in the art of fighting and magic.

If you have some time to kill, I would recommend these stories. I found them very interesting, and over time I really grew to love the characters.

However, it’s that “over time” part that really marks the difference between then and now in the publishing world. Nowadays, there is no time for building an audience, especially in the short fiction market (though, I think that is also more and more true for the novel market, as well). A short fiction author is lucky if readers don’t give up on their stories within the first few paragraphs. As a reader myself, even I’ve been guilty of this. If a flash piece doesn’t grab me at least a little bit at the beginning, I’ve been known to bail on it, even if it was less than 1,000 words. I just don’t have enough time for reading something I’m not that into.

But back then, you had the luxury of time. If you were a good writer, your stuff would get published and your audience was allowed to grow. When I first started reading the Tarma and Kethry stories, I remember thinking, this is an interesting premise, but if this story were submitted to a market today, it would get rejected. There isn’t enough punch at the beginning, not enough of a hook. To really get invested in the characters, I had to read the first two or three short stories in the anthology — back when they were first published, these stories weren’t even in an anthology all together, so you only had one at a time to read.

So, as I ponder if I have any ideas worth working on and submitted to the S&S market this year, I think back to Tarma and Kethry and realize how much things have changed. Its a faster and more competitive world out there for writers, and snagging readers is more difficult, so we have to be at our best all the time, and even then our stories may not get accepted.

However, I don’t want to end this post on a down note. I really want people to take away from this that I’m discouraged about writing or publishing, because I’m not. I just try to approach it with a realistic mind set and no false hopes.

If I never become rich and famous in this game, that’s fine. I mean, I wouldn’t turn down rich and famous, but I don’t expect it. I just want to write, and I know that’s something I’ll be doing forever, no matter how many stories I have published (or don’t have published).

Man, when Stephen first upgraded my blog to the new version of WordPress, my spam count went down to almost nothing. It was so nice! But now, a few months later, the spam demons have found me again. Not as bad as they were before, but it’s getting up there.

Luckily, the new WordPress makes deleting spam a lot easier than the old version, in which I had to deal with each comment. Now I can just hit “delete all spam” and poof, it’s gone.

The one problem I’m having is that sometimes a legitimate comment finds its way into the spam folder instead of actually posting or going into the pending folder. I try to glance through the spam folder to make sure I’m not deleting a valid comment, but when the spam numbers are up over 100, I don’t always have that much time.

So, I just wanted to mention it here and say that if you posted a comment and it never showed up, it might have gotten deleted as spam. If that happened, I’m sorry! I definitely wouldn’t have done that on purpose!

If you post a comment and it doesn’t appear on the site, you’re always welcome to shoot me an email and let me know. Then I’ll know that there is a reason to comb through the hundreds of spam messages.

My writing group mate Virginia has started her first blog — Coaxing the Muse. Check it out when you get a chance. Some of her recent short story/flash/microfiction publications are linked there, as well.

Glad to have you among my fellow bloggers, VA!

Got a bummer of a rejection today. There aren’t a lot of markets out there for short stories that reach 8K, but some of the ones that will accept stories that long are really prestigious ones — the kind of markets I’ve been trying to crack for a while now.

I have a story I wrote last year that is about 8K, and I think it’s a pretty solid 8K. If I have to cut it down to 5K to try to submit it somewhere, I think it will weaken the story.

I got a rejection note today from the latest place that I sent the story, and it was one of those almost rejections. They said that the story was “well received” by the editors, but after “further thought” they decided not to accepted it.

Man! Now, granted, this is way better than a form rejection. They actually at least liked the story and considered it, as opposed to rejecting out of hand.

However, it’s more frustrating, too — they actually liked it, but rejected it anyway. I was almost in, but didn’t quite make it. And there wasn’t really any explanation as to why. It’s that subjectivity thing again!

We’ll have to see what I can do with my 8K monster story. I need to do some market crawling and find somewhere else to submit it. And I think I definitely need to send something else to this particular market. Maybe the next story I send them will be the one!

Hey, a girl can hope!

So, I guess this is the last place that I haven’t talked yet about the biggest reason why my writing output has been down this year — and my reading and my blogging, too. Since this is a writing blog, I tend not to discuss non-writing/real life all that much, but maybe now it’s time.

A lot of you (especially the people that I know in real life) already know this, but for those who don’t, my husband and I found out over Christmas that we are expecting our first baby! The last ultrasound said that it’s a girl, and she’s due at the end of August! (Don’t ask me about names — we had our boy name picked out for sure, but we’re totally up in the air on girl names, and it’s looking like we’ll be that way until we actually meet her!)

We are very, very excited about this. It’s something we’ve wanted for a long time, though we only officially started seriously trying for it last year. There have been a few little bobbles so far, like a fainting spell and the morning sickness that didn’t go away until way into the second trimester, but for the most part everything is going really well.

I know it’s going to be a big adjustment. If it’s been this hard for me to get up the energy to write when all I’ve deal with so far is morning sickness and fatigue (I’ve been going to bed at 9:45, OMG!), what’s going to happen when there are 3 a.m. feedings and everything else that goes along with having a little one of your very own?

Whatever happens, it’s going to be an interesting journey, and I’m looking forward to every part of it — even the challenging parts.

I can’t not write — I’m always making up stories in my head, even when I’m too tired to sit down at the computer and write them down. I know that I’ll figure this out eventually, and writing will happen. We’ll just see how long it takes me to get there!

When you can get a really good writing group together, the result is kind of like magic, and it’s something you don’t want to lose if you can help it.

It’s hard, because people are people. Sometimes, they don’t gel and there are bad feelings. That hurts the group, because a good writing group has to trust each other to share their very personal creative visions. A flame war is the quickest way to lose your group.

Other times, it’s hard to find the right mix of committed people. A lot of times people will get excited about the idea of a group, but once they actually join, then they disappear and you never see them again. I never know why that happens. Maybe the reality of actually having to crit other people’s stories to get their own stories critiqued was too difficult for them? Maybe they are intimidated by a group that already knows each other? Maybe, while they want to write, they just ultimately don’t have the discipline to sit down and do it (which, by extension, means they don’t have the discipline to make the time for group activities, as well)?

There could be a million reasons. But, personally, I think that having a lot of members in your group who never show up and never contribute weakens the group as a whole. It makes it harder to build trust between the members because people don’t want to share their stories with people they never see or talk to, or people who never share their own work in return. 

Disappearing members also makes it really hard to plan group events and activities. If you can’t count on people to show up at least some of the time or for certain events, how can you get a good group rhythm going?

And it can be really frustrating if the people who disapppear stick around just long enough to vote on issues that affect the group as a whole, but then vanish, leaving the group as a whole to deal with the affects of that vote. Of course, that probably happens in any group that is made up of people, whether it’s a writing group, a sewing group, or something entirely different.

And then there is the whole time issue in general, which is always a challenge. These days, everyone has a busy life. It can be a conundrum in and of itself to find a time that everyone can get together to devote an hour or so to writing and critiquing. Things come up — Bible studies, night school, family issues — and suddenly core members can’t meet on the same old night.

But, if you can find that perfect mix of people and time and get a writing group off the ground, the effort is worth it.

My writing group, Writer’s Ink, has been going for several years now. It has its ups and downs, but in the past couple of years we’ve finally developed a strong core group of members who don’t disappear on us and who are dedicated both to our own writing and to helping each other improve our writing.

It’s been fascinating to watch all of the core group develop as writers. Most of us didn’t have any publications at all when we started — or maybe just one or two. But in the past couple of years, suddenly stories from our group are showing up all over the place. Check out the publication lists on my blog, Alex’s, Stephanie’s, and Jens’s — you’ll see. All of a sudden, a group member gets that first publication, and before you know it, they’re going gang-busters.

The things I’ve learned from these guys would take me forever to list. Just to hit a few highlights, Jens has taught me to be a total nazi in my elimination of complex verb constructions and how that leads to a much more polished whole with a much better flow. Reading Stephanie’s work has given me so much inspiration for word choice — she always uses words in her stories that are completely unexpected, and yet make perfect sense in the unique way she used them. And when she critiques my stuff, not only do I benefit from her super copy editing skills, but she has this way of asking quesitons that makes me re-think certain choices in ways that improve the whole. Alex opened my eyes to the superhero fiction genre, a new favorite of mine, and he has this great understanding of all types of genre fiction as a whole that he brings to our crit sessions. I can always count on him to keep me from straying too far into cliched territory. Virginia, my fearless co-leader, is the most encouraging critter I’ve ever had, and yet she also isn’t afraid to be critical when it will improve the story. Some things I’ve learned from her are the evils of using the words “almost” or “just” and how to avoid clunky word repetition and annoying be verbs. And there’s my darling sister, Jamie, too — she’s been critting my stories since we were kids, and she is the person who keeps me honest. When I’m being too nice to my characters (a big weakness of mine), she kicks me in the butt and sets me straight again. Good stories require drama and plot, and good drama and plot require unhappy characters!

But the other cool thing about a writing group that really gels is when the creative energy starts flowing. Sometimes you don’t even need a crit. We get together at least once a month for write-ins. We started having them regularly after learning about them during National Novel Writing Month one year. There is something about a group of people sitting together and writing that really makes the creative energy flow. Suddenly, I have a huge chunk of story that I didn’t have before.

Sure, if I sat down at home and wrote, the same thing could happen. But at home there are so many distractions to pull my attention away. When I’m at a write-in, I’m there to write. And so are the others, and when we’re serious like that, the writing just comes.

Also, it’s great to be at a write-in when you get stuck on something. Everyone is always willing to take a five-minute break to help you pick the perfect character name or help you get past the plot point that’s got you stuck.

Our group challenges each other, too, which helps with that whole aspect of making yourself sit down and write. If I want to win the group’s monthly prompts contest, I have to write. If I want to compete in the group’s anually Story Every Day contest, I have to write. If I want to contribute a story to our annual themed collection… you guessed it, I have to write. Sometimes, those stories you force yourself to write don’t work, but I’ve gotten so many stories from activities like that published over the past couple of years, that I know it’s worth it.

I know that one day things will change and I won’t have the Writer’s Ink that I know and love any more. People will move away, change jobs, run out of time to devote to the group and/or their writing. Hopefully, even if we aren’t a formal group any more, at least some of us will still be crit partners. Who knows what the future holds? This year alone promises many changes. I just hope that such a time is a long time in coming, because I love this group. And, no matter what happens, I’ll always be glad that I had them for however long, because they have totally helped to shape me into the writer I am today!

This week has been a really good one for my writing group! Two publications already, and now a third. Go, Writer’s Ink!

Virginia had a piece of microfiction published at Six Sentences. It’s called “Reality Bites.”

Writing anything in a mere six sentences sounds crazy hard to me — how do you get a complete story in something that small? But she did it, and there is an ending twist and everything.

Makes me want to try my hand at a six-sentence story. After all, I used to feel the same astonished way about flash, and now writing a story in 1,000 words is totally doable for me.

Congrats again, VA!