Living the Fictional Dream

Happy 2010, readers! I hope the new year is treating you well so far, and that the writers out there have already begun to garner plentiful word counts and loads of acceptance letters!

The Preditors and Editors Reader’s Poll is live. It honors print and electronic publications that published in 2009. Click here to vote for your favorite ‘Zine.

There are a lot of good ones nominated this year. I had a hard time choosing! If you’re a fan of 10Flash, Residential Aliens, Everyday Fiction, or a score of other magazines, go over there and place a vote for your favorite.

To elminate ballot stuffing, you have to give your email address and click a confirmation link to make your vote valid, but that’s understandable. I hate polls where the same person can vote as many times as they want to.

Well, I have to run. The day job beckons, as do plans for my sister’s wedding. It is going to be a busy January at my house!

The premier of The Vampire Diaries on the CW this month led me to pull all my old L.J. Smith young adult novels off the back shelf where they had been collecting dust and give them a re-read for the first time since the ’90s. Strangely enough, I don’t actually own a copy of The Vampire Diaries book trilogy, but I have copies of what (in my opinion) were Smith’s better trilogies — Dark Visions, The Secret Circle, and The Forbidden Game.

It’s been fun to journey down memory lane by rereading these old books. I loved them when I was the right age for them. In fact, Dark Visions was one of several inspirations for one of my novels-in-progress.

But, reading them now, with much more writing experience (and life, too) behind me, I can recognize their flaws much more readily than I could back then.

I may come back and address other flaws in these books, as I can think of several, but today I wanted to talk about eye color.

For some reason, writers love to take liberties with eye color. Why have boring old brown or blue eyes when youre characters can have aquamarine, violet, or amber colored eyes?

Now, I will admit to having done this on occasion. One character in my urban fantasy ‘verse, a werewolf, has the distinguishing characteristic of ice blue eyes. Though, I did do some research — there are a few wolves who have blue eyes.

But these L.J. Smith novels take eye color way over the top. One heroine has pine green eyes. One hero has blue-gray eyes that, every time they are described, are comparied to the sea. A villain has eyes that are bluer than blue — described as the blue that you see when you close your eyes, an unearthly blue (though, he is a Shadow Man from an evil dimension, so maybe he has a right to crazy colored eyes). A villainess has eyes alternately described as amber and golden, which are paired with honey-colored skin and a mane of black hair. A supporting character is always described as having emotionless or cool gray eyes.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that character descriptions are a powerful tool for drawing your reader into your world and for helping them to remember a character. All characters really do need one feature that is uniquely there’s so that the reader can distinguish that character from all the rest.

However, that distinguishing feature does not always have to be the eyes. And if you use too many crazy eye colors in one story, it starts to feel absurd and/or cliche. Maybe just give one character unique eyes, and let other characters have something of their own — a unique hair color, thick eyebrows, unusual stature (tall or petite), large hands, etc.

Now I have the urge to revisit my young adult novel in progress and see how many crazy eye colors I put in there. I remember emerald green and violet off the top of my head. Uh-oh!

The other day, I suddenly had the urge to pull my copy of The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew down off my bookshelf. If you’ve never heard of the Peppers, they were the stars of Margaret Sidney’s children’s book series, which was originally published from 1881 to 1916. It took me a year or so of active Ebaying, but I finally managed to get copies of the whole Pepper series.

I remember finding the first Pepper book in my elementary school library and devouring it as a child. I always loved classic children’s stories from the turn of the century. Little Women still tops my favorite books of all time list (as well as being the book I’ve read the most ever), and some of my other childhood favorites included A Little Princess and The Secret Garden.

The great thing about these books is how uplifting they are. They create likable characters that you can whole-heartedly root for as they navigate their way through various imaginative and home-spun situations. Good always wins in the end, the villains are either truly evil or redeemed, the good guys are stalwart and true, and happiness is ultimately attained for those who deserve it.

Part of me has always longed to visit a world in which there was both the time and gumption to think of elaborate theatricals and perform them for one’s friends. A time when a trip to the store was an event to be dressed up for, not an errand to run. A time when occaions were marked with imaginative and homemade gifts, and good-natured frolics and outings were encouraged regularly. A time when sitting around telling each other stories was a favorite way to pass the time.

I suppose some people would think these stories too sweet or that they have too few dimensions. I will admit, they are not adult fair, but as a child, I loved them. And I still appreciate them today. When Jasper and Mr. King invite the whole of the Pepper family to move into the mansion in the city so they can have a better life than the hand-to-mouth existence they eeked out on Mrs. Pepper’s sewing and brother Ben’s wood chopping, it still gives me a little thrill of excitement. They met their hardships and travails with courage and good humor, and in the end, they got everything they ever wanted. It’s the same kind of thrill I get when Sara Crewe from A Little Princess wakes up to find that her cold attic bedroom has become a wonderful fairyland full of food and new clothes.

However, going back and reading these books as an adult does give one another perspective on them. There are some strange points of view in these old stories that were probably prevalent when they were published, but that seem very strange to the modern eye.

For instance, there is a scene at the beginning of The Five Little Peppers Midway in which the youngest Pepper, Phronsie, decides to bake a pie for her sister Polly. She asks Mr. King’s cook for help, and, of course, the cook is thrilled to help her with her project, as Phronsie is the pet of the household. Phronsie reaches out to take the cook’s hand as they walk to the kitchen, but the cook, a black man, is afraid to let her take it because (he says) he is too black to sully a lily like Phronsie.

I must admit, reading that scene made me cringe. If I ever read this to my little girl, I will be tempted to skip right over that scene entirely, and go straight to the baking scene. The fact that someone would feel that another person was worth more than them based on the color of skin — it rubs me the wrong way. And, it also says something about the attitude of Sidney that she would write it this way instead of, perhaps, that he was afraid to take her hand because he would get in trouble for stepping above his station, not because he thought she was that much more wonderful than he. But, the scene is moderately redeemed by the fact that Phronsie does not let the cook get away without holding her hand, because it’s his hand, therefore part of him, and she likes him just the way he is.

There is also a prevalent attitude that it is bad for children to cry. I suspect it was prevalent at the time of publication — or at least very strongly believed in by Sidney. That tempertantrums are things to be avoided is not so strange, but so are tears shed for sadness or other reasons that today would be encouraged as self-expression or being in touch with one’s emotions. If a character in the Pepper books has the need for a good cry, they are always begged not to let the tears go for the sake of their health (it will make you sick!) and so as not to distress their mother, Mr. King, or whatever adult happens to be around.

But, despite some foibles because these books were written over 100 years ago, over all, I still like them. And, even as an adult, every once in a while, I like diving into that simpler time. Staying there all the time would be too much, but an occasional visit to the old fashioned land of the Peppers, the Marches, or Sara Crewe can be quite refreshing.

During my dip, though, I will have to be careful not to follow Sidney’s writing style. She seldom uses the word “said,” instead favoring more descriptive terms, no matter how absurd they seem (e.g., cried, screamed, laughed). And don’t get me started on her overuse of adverbs and words that don’t mean anything — like “just” and “almost.”

And when I’m reading about the Peppers, I find myself wanting to use their pet phrases, such as “I almost know” (i.e., I almost know that Mom will let me adopt this puppy), in every day conversation.

If you hear me utter one of those old fashioned phrases, just smile and nod… and perhaps grant me an invitation to your next amateur theatrical, if you please!

I’ve been reading a series recently that, despite having intriguing characteres and a well-drawn fantasy world, repeatedly commits what I consider a big sin for an author — leaving emotional moments out of the story.

The author has such an engaging voice and conceives such good characters, I don’t know why she keeps making this misstep. I’ll be reading along in the story, and she’ll start building up a dramatic moment or event. In the most recent book, basically one of the main female characters had to participate in a magic spell. The spell would kill her — something that had to be done to achieve the end result they needed — but someone would be standing by with another spell to (hopefully) revive her afterwards.

You can probably tell just by my description that such a moment should have been pivotal. It’s the potential death of a major character — talk about a moment rife with drama. The idea of this spell was mentioned in the second-to-last book of the series, and when the character’s husband heard about it, he lashed out at the messenger and then nearly died himself because the messenger had a magic mirror that reflected the blow back on the caster. For the rest of that book and the beginning of the last book, the other characters utilize all this effort convincing the husband that there is no other choice and this risk is their only option. Either his wife is killed to save the rest of them and possibly revived, or all eight brothers and their wives die.

Finally, the husband is convinced. Then we spend pages getting more detail than I personally needed about the mechanics of the magic involved and what would happen. Then there is a scene break, and the beginning of the next scene starts after the spell has been cast and the wife has been revived without a single hitch.

… WTF? …

Talk about feeling cheated! I endured all that set up — some interesting, but some, frankly, a little boring — and then I don’t even get to see the moment of truth? What happened? How did the husband react when his wife was dead? Was there any moment when it seemed as if she would not be revived in time?

And this is not the only time that this author has committed this sin of omission. She doesn’t do it with every emotion-packed moment, but several times throughout the series she had the chance to write a very impactful scene, a scene that she’d been building up to for a while, and then just doesn’t write it. Instead, she skips over it to the happy conclusion and moves on to the next plot point.

As a reader, I feel cheated. As a writer, it amazes me that the author of this series is willing to skip these moments. The climax may be a challenge to write, but it’s the big pay out. It’s why we’re all there? Why would you ever want to skip it, when that’s the moment that affects your characters the most?

Perhaps its an offshoot of a problem that I sometimes have in my writing — being too easy on my characters. My characters are my babies — I created them out of nothing and I want the best for them. Sometimes it’s hard to hurt them and so I wuss out (when I do, though, my sister and my writing group mates always call me on it!). Maybe this author has the same problem and just can’t always manage to write about the dramatic/bad/hard stuff that happens to her characters?

In this instance, I enjoyed the world enough that I was a forgiving reader and kept going, despite my dissatisfaction with this tendency. However, if I’d been busier at the time or had other books that I wanted to read, I would have been more likely to drop this series and move on to the next one.

As a writer, you can’t guarantee that readers are going to forgive such a faux pas. Instead, the writer needs to do their utmost to keep the reader immersed in the fictional dream — don’t let them escape until you’re done with your story, and you have a much better chance that the readers will keep coming back for more.

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!

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).

Sometimes, it’s really hard for me to turn off the editing portion of my brain and just read. I’ll be reading along, be it a novel or the latest offering from one of my favorite online fiction venues, and I’ll come across some bit of language and think how much better it would have been if they’d edited just a little more closely — eliminate that passive voice or not say the same word twice so close together, things like that.

Now, of course, if it’s a style thing, that’s totally different, but a lot of the time, it reads to me like it’s just a be verb or whatever that the author didn’t notice, as opposed to a conscious choice to stick with the passive.

I was reading a story recently that said something like, “Her dress covered her like….” (The quotes have been changed, because I don’t want to point fingers.) I thought the similie that the author used to describe the outfit was lovely, but the sentence would have been so much more impactful to me if the author had written, “The dress covered her…” instead. Having the same word twice so close together bumps me out of the story and has me thinking about repetition and redundant word choice instead of marvelling over the similie and description.

Then, not much farther down in the same story, there was an intrusive be verb — something simple like, “He was walking down the street.” Again, I was thrown out of the story to wonder why the author didn’t just say, “He walked down the street.” Why put in that passive voice, when the active voice flows so much better and creates a more vivid picture?

It’s like, now that I search for these things in my own work with such a critical eye, I can’t shut my brain off when I see these things elsewhere. And then I wonder why the author didn’t see them. If only he or she had taken a few extra minutes to edit — perhaps do a search for be verbs. Such a small thing can make a story so much crisper and cleaner!

Is it the mark of a writer who has not spent as much time honing his or her craft? I know that I used to fling passive voice, repeated words, and complicated verb constructions around with abandon. I go back to some of my earlier work and wonder how I ever didn’t see that! It’s thanks to the efforts of my writing group that I’ve learned to go through my first drafts with a fine-toothed comb, searching for better, more active, more descriptive ways to say things.

(A quick shout out here to writing group mate Jens for his nazi like devotion to marking complex verb constructions in crits, and to writing group mate Virginia for doggedly pointing out each and every repeated word! And, heck, to all of Writer’s Ink in general — I’ve learned so much from you guys!)

An author blog I read once recommended reading a book about screen writing and the three-act structure as a way to help develop novel plots. The caveat I remember this author mentioning was that after she read the book and understood the formula used in movie scripts, it made it harder for her to simply lose herself in a film. Instead, she was always looking for the catalyst, the denouement, and the other traditional parts of the screenplay.

Sometimes I feel that way about reading. The more I hone my craft and the better I get at this writing thing, the harder it is for me to be forgiving of other work out there. Especially published work, and especially work that is published in novel format. I’m much more apt to set a novel down and not pick it up again if the writing is sloppy than I ever used to be — even if I like the plot and the characters.

The mark of a really good book to me is one that sucks me in as a reader and totally short circuits the editing brain. If I look up an hour later, and I haven’t thought about word choice, grammar, or passive voice once, it’s a good story.

Take the Twilight series as an example. People give it a hard time because it’s not quality literature (I’m not sure it’s supposed to be, but people judge best sellers harshly, I suppose). And it’s true — there are many books that are better written than Twilight (though, I do think that Meyer’s craft improved over the course of the series). But when I jump into the world of Bella, Jacob, and Edward, I am totally sucked in. Hours can go by, and I don’t even notice until I start getting a crick in my neck or the phone rings.

That is the point that character, setting, and good, old-fashioned story-telling trump the mechanics of writing. Twilight transports me into the fictional dream and doesn’t let me go without a fight. To me, that’s the mark of a good novel that’s worth reading, no matter what the nay-sayers think. (Though, I can see how someone who’s not into young adult romance or vampires might not be sucked in the same way — subject matter is subjective.)

So, from the reader’s perspective, I guess I would have to say that the editor’s brain is a detriment. It is harder to enjoy reading certain things than it used to be — I’m much more selective than I used to be.

But, from the writer’s perspective, the editor’s brain is an asset that you simply cannot do without. The better your craft, the better chances you have of selling it — case closed. Sure, sometimes less well written stories get published, but I prefer to think that’s because the person who bought it was swept away by the story and the characters so much that they didn’t mind a few mechanical flaws.

I don’t think I would give up my editing brain, not even for all the reading enjoyment in the world. There are enough books out there that still suck me in and there are books with issues that I still enjoy (remember the clavicle thing from the Luxe series?), despite being knocked out of the fictional dream every once in a while. There is a wide world of books to choose from out there — I’ll keep my editing brain and let it have a field day with all of my first drafts.

And then all you guys can laugh at me when you read something of mine where I missed a glaring instance of word repetition or passive voice!

The folks over at Every Day Fiction and Every Day Poets have started a writing blog specifically devoted to flash fiction. If the quality of the blog is anything like the quality of fiction and poetry these publications offer us on a daily basis, the blog should be a must read.

Today’s entry was written by my writing group mate Alex, and discusses the effect of exposition and world building on flash fiction stories.

Here’s the link so you can go check it out:

I’m always fascinated by stories that approach time in something other than a linear fashion. The movie Memento is a stellar example of this. The main character has a condition where he can’t make long-term memories, so once they leave his short-term memory, they are gone forever. To illustrate this, the movie progresses in reverse.

Another example of stories that play with time well is the TV show How I Met Your Mother. I truly believe that this is the best-written sitcom that I have ever watched. Their grasp of continuity is amazing. Something is mentioned in a throw-away line in season 1, and it comes up as a huge plot point in season 3. And the stuff that they put in for viewers with a sharp enough mind to catch it makes the show really fun to watch.

But I especially like it when HIMYM plays with time. They’ve done several episodes where they tell stories out of sequence. Sometimes they’ll split the plot between the characters — do one or two characters’ stories from start to finish, then rewind and go to the next one. Other times, they will throw in flashbacks in creative and amusing ways (my favorite was once when they put in a flashback to 30 seconds ago — and it worked).

The best thing about stories that experiment with time is how the normally linear element is twisted and used to give the reader/viewer a unique A-Ha moment — that moment when everything you knew about the story is flipped on its head and you see it all from a whole new light.

I’ve always wanted to expirament with non-linear time in my stories, but I have yet to really do so. I’m not sure why… Part of it may be that I’ve just never had an idea that seemed like it would work well in such a structure. And part of it might be that I seem to have a bias in that a more visual medium seems more appropriate for these types of stories.

I know that second limitation is all in my head, though. I’ve read print stories that did a fine job of twisting time. There was one in particular that I remember enjoying at Every Day Fiction — sadly, I have long since forgotten its name. I just remember it was a story about a guy in prison that was told backwards Memento style, and it was pretty good.

I will have to put my mind to this time twisting conundrum and see if my muse has anything to say about it. It would definitely be a challenging project.

What about you guys? Any recommendations for good time twisting stories/shows you want to share? Have you ever tried your hand at such a story? If so, how difficult was it?

While on vacation in Sedona, I read two novels by Karen Macinerney — her “tales of an urban werewolf,” Howling at the Moon and On the Prowl. This series is about a werewolf named Sophie Garou who lives in Austin, Texas. Sophie has lived all of her life trying to keep her “hairy problem” a secret from everyone she knows, and juggling her normal life as an auditor with wolfsbane tea and a mother who owns a magic shop and is a little psychic.

Overall, I enjoyed these books (thanks to writing group mate Sandra who loaned them to me!). They are fun urban fantasies with a strong female character. There are also charsimatic male characters (including a male werewolf named Tom and Sophie’s human boyfriend, Heath), and interesting supporting cast, like Sophie’s witch mom and her best friend Lindsey.

One facet of these novels is a mystery that has to be solved by the end of the installment. I wouldn’t call them mystery novels — the urban fantasy is much stronger with these stories as far as genre goes — but the mystery is there as a supporting element. Especially in the first book of the series.

In Howling at the Moon, Sophie’s mother is accused of murder, and she has to figure out who really did the dastardly deed. By the end of the novel, we have a suspect in hand, thanks to Sophie and Lindsey’s sleuthing, so it should be case closed. And it is, as far as the mystery goes.

However, at the end of the novel, I was unsatisfied with the conclusion of said mystery. We did meet the murderer earlier in the story, so it wasn’t completely out of nowhere, but said murderer was never on the list of possible suspects. Not even a tiny blip on the suspect radar. The only reason Sophie is tipped in the right direction was because she stumbled upon something magical, and her mother, who didn’t use that kind  of magic, sent Sophie to a different magic shop to find information. It just randomly happened that the magic shop Sophie visited happened to be run by a relative of the murderer.

The whole thing felt very random and happenstance. If Sophie had gone to any other magic shop in the whole city, she wouldn’t have been able to solve the mystery.

I think the mystery would have had a more satisfying conclusion if the muderer had been on the short list of suspects in the first place. As it was, Sophie spends a lot of time running about after suspects who are all red herrings, and even when the murder victim gives them a clue from his ghostly state, the clue turns out to be bunk — unrelated to his actual death.

I don’t want to be too harsh on the books, because I thought they were an enjoyable read, but my issues with the mystery in book one started me thinking about how mysteries are not a plot element that you can toss into a story willy-nilly. To make a mystery truly satisfying to the reader, you have to do the work. A twist ending is only awesome if, once you get the twist, it shows the whole rest of the novel in another light. All the clues have to be in place. A mystery is not satisfying if it comes out of left field.