Reviews 37 - Ilona Andrews Magic Shifts

Reviews 37
Magic Shifts
byIlona Andrews 

The Reviews series has not been indexed yet.  And I have messed up the numbering, resulting in two posts numbered 34. I'm not planning to fix that, as I think this is the only duplicate.

The first Reviews 34 is:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2017/11/reviews-34-implausible-made-real-by.html

The second Reviews 34 is:
https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2018/05/reviews-34-by-jacqueline-lichtenberg.html
Today we again raise the topic of what, exactly, is Paranormal Romance?

In fact, it would be good to ponder the abstract problem of what Romance really is.

The best way to figure out where you, the writer, stands on these two questions is to read-read-read.  Read reams of non-fiction, yes, but loads and loads of fiction outside your target genre.

It is painful, I know, but as you did in High School and College, read things you don't enjoy.  Yes, you must read for enjoyment because enjoyment is your stock in trade, what you have to sell, and if you don't have any enjoyment, you can't sell any.

You must have an overflowing reservoir of enjoyment in your heart.  Therefore, read Ilona Andrews (all titles).  Pay special attention to the Kate Daniels novels.  If you read them already, just because they are best sellers - read them again as a set.

At the same time, to convey that enjoyment in your heart to others, to purvey that enjoyment you have collected over years, you must understand more about story structure than your reader does.  You must make the structure of your story as invisible to your readers as the great writers you've been reading make their story structure invisible to you.

Therefore, today we take up a relationship-driven Action-Romance-Paranormal by a husband/wife collaborating team.  There are a few like that working in the field today, but the Ilona Andrews byline is the best example at my fingertips right now.

MAGIC SHIFTS is a "Kate Daniels Novel" -- and the 8th in the Series.

The collaboration is seamless -- there is no jarring shift from one writer's style to the other.  It is a blended style, probably done somewhat the way Jean Lorrah and I collaborate, with every word gone over by both.

They have mastered the trick of "pacing" -- the narrative moves smoothly from cerebral to action scenes.

They have SHOW DON'T TELL down pat. The Characters do not tell you what they are feeling (and the novels replete with conflicting feelings).  Even if you have not read the previous novels, you know what these people are feeling.

The two main Characters, a retiring Alpha pair from a shapeshifter Pack, are not yet married, but yes they are very married, oh, very very married.

This is a Couple novel -- an after-the-Romance novel, which does ask the question, "Can this couple ever get to Happily Ever After?"

The answer seems to be Yes, but maybe not "ever-after" -- as there are still problems to be solved.  They are now living in typical suburbia, adjacent to acres of wild forrest to run in, with houses on the block inhabited by other shapeshifters who have left the Pack to follow the Alpha Couple out of loyalty or other personal necessity.

Yes, I recommend the previous novels in this series, and yes, I have read them.  If Shapeshifter novels are your passion, you must know all your readers will have a familiarity with these works.

But the Kate Daniels universe has another, vastly interesting, quirk.  Here is not a choice between magic and technology, not a World Bridge to cross to go from where Magic works to where Technology works.  Here, Magic washes over the Technology based normal world you know, and disables all our devices and gadgets.  Civilization adjusts, and we see our world in semi-ruins but life goes on, with Magic working sometimes and Technology working other times.

The shifts can be dangerous.

Meanwhile, Magical creatures rampage and must be stopped.

Plenty of monster hunts, and battles, and plenty of mysterious puzzles to solve.  The latter gives this the flavor of a Mystery/Detective series while the puzzles themselves work a lot like science fiction.

So, just don't miss reading Ilona Andrews titles.  It is a trustworthy,, go-to byline.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacqquelinelichtenberg.com

RavenCon

My husband, our youngest son, and I spent the past weekend at RavenCon in Williamsburg, Virginia.

RavenCon

This was our second year of attendance and the first year my husband (Leslie Roy Carter) and I have participated in panels there. The 2018 writer guest of honor was horror author and STAR WARS tie-in writer Chuck Wendig.

My husband and I appeared together on a panel about "Collaborating as a Couple." It wasn't quite what I expected, because the other couple weren't writers; they worked in film on special effects, makeup, and costuming. They provided lots of interesting anecdotes and information about their profession. I took part in a session on "The Evolution of Horror." Of course, we couldn't adequately cover such a wide topic in fifty minutes, but we had an engaging discussion with plenty of audience response. Les also participated in "Ask a Scientist," "Weapons Engineering," and "One If by Air, Two If by Sea" (mainly on military science in real life and fiction).

I especially liked the panel on SUPERNATURAL, one of my favorite long-running TV series. "Medicine in Fantasy" was full of intriguing information plus opinions on realistic and not-so-realistic depictions of healing in fantasy, and it could easily have gone much longer. Some writing-related sessions I viewed all or part of included "Life Hacks for Writers," "Ignore This Advice: Writing Tips That Aren't So Great," "Writing Outside the Box," and "Writer Without a Day Job" (featuring a group of full-time writers whose apparent productivity put me to shame). "Everybody Dies" discussed good and bad ways to handle character deaths. "Vampires, Monsters, and Ghosts—Oh, My" didn't particularly focus on vampires, as I'd expected; it was about using monsters in general in fiction. "Is That Blood on Your Dress?" dealt with the history and appeal of Gothic romance. "Morally Ambiguous Bad Guys" and "Longing for the Love of Monsters" were a couple of other highlights.

I enjoyed the filk group Misbehavin' Maidens, who performed lively, funny, mildly bawdy songs (mildly in the daytime show I attended, anyway). The set included "Dumb Ways to Con" (what not to do at conventions) and, as a sign of the times, a piece about consent. The Saturday night masquerade didn't have a huge number of entries, but they were all worth seeing. My favorite was a couple enchantingly costumed as Beauty and the Beast. Also, there was a woman in a green dress and matching green antlers whom I found very impressive, though I can't remember what the outfit represented. The con naturally had film and anime tracks, none of which I watched because of attending panels or going to bed in time to get a reasonable amount of sleep. In the snack and relaxation space labeled Ten-Forward, a fan group screened some original STAR TREK episodes they'd produced, of which we watched a few minutes. The films seemed to have quite a professional look.

The hotel has a confusing layout for the uninitiated, but this being our second year there, I began to get the hang of it. The spread-out nature of the space made the gathering feel uncrowded even though the total attendance (from what I heard) significantly exceeds that of our Thanksgiving weekend event, ChessieCon.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Plot Integration Part 8 - Use of Co-incidence in Plotting

The posts with "Integration" of two skills in the title are "advanced" discussions.

Here's the index to the previous 7 parts in this series. 
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

Now we'll tackle the entire STEN SERIES by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole.  It is not Romance, so we can be more objective about the story and how it's constructed. 

To do the kind of study I intend to show you how to do with a Romance genre novel would be impossible.  You'd get too caught up in the particular dimensions that we resonate to and not be able to discern the structural bones behind those dimensions. 

For a while now, I've been searching for an example I could use to illustrate the techniques that create widely selling, big hits, that are not shallow.  You see the kind of book I'm talking about in Regency Romance where an entire world of technology and psychology cradles a story which is deceptively simple on the surface, unutterably profound within. 

But readers who dislike Romance don't see the profound depths.

There's something of the same effect in action-based Science Fiction.  Readers who dislike "science" often don't see the profound depths in an action galactic-war novel. 

But sometimes it is those invisible depths that produce the gigantic, explosive, (bewildering to the publisher) sales track record of a series. 

And oddly enough there are some techniques that power action/military Science Fiction sales that can easily be applied to Romance, but seldom have been, or where you have found it, it isn't done Blockbuster Style.

I love action/romance genre novels - particularly space-military-romance -- double-particularly with a human/alien romance.  When the theme and plot are integrated using the techniques that drive the Sten Series, those mixed-genre Romances sizzle! 

When you add sizzle to profound, you will get that explosive sales pattern that you see at the top of the Romance Genre lists. 

Sten, of the Sten Series, is a sizzling hot hero who can't settle into a Relationship -- well, read all 8 novels for how that ends up. 

I think you'll find the ending of the series a springboard into a human/alien romance of your own -- completely different but the same.  (Isn't that what Hollywood is famous for demanding "the same but different?"  Well we're going to study how to do that by examining what a writing team that DID THAT consistently to make a living in Hollywood, wrote in their novels.)

I've talked about Allan Cole in previous posts as someone with a career worth studying if you plan to be a successful writer in today's swiftly changing world.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/01/career-management-for-writers-in.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/02/worldbuilding-from-reality-part-2.html

We're going to examine how he and Chris Bunch achieved what they did with the STEN SERIES. 

The point here is that the The Sten Seriesis a genuine "series" (with a masterplan behind it like Babylon 5) -- a single story in 8 volumes.  Click the title to see my reviews on Amazon, on Kindle versions. 

It is not romance genre.  It's action, military SF.  We're going to reverse engineer it and apply what we learn to ROMANCE GENRE.

Remember, the point behind all these posts dating back to 2007 is to figure out why Romance genre is not held in the high esteem we think it should be, and how to change that.  Sheer sales volume won't get us that kind of respect.  But sales volume is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for garnering that respect. 

Sales volume achieved in spite of, rather than because of, professional promotional support does gain the kind of attention that can lead to the respect we're talking about. 

THE STEN SERIES is a major clue.  Read this from Allan Cole, co-author of STEN.  Follow the link in this email letter, and read about how the series was originated and sold.

-------quote from email from Allan Cole -----------
...
The tale of how Sten came into being has to be one of the weirdest stories in writerly history. I told the story in one of the early Hollywood MisAdventures: "Sten - The Fast Turnaround Caper." And it goes into some detail. Here's the link:

http://www.allan-cole.com/2011/07/sten-fast-turnaround-caper.html My guess is that it'll have you on the floor. >g<

As for the publisher's sales efforts - they were sorely lacking. The books basically sold themselves. And sold so well in fact that our agent (Russ Galen) got well over six figures for each of the last two books. I don't think Del Rey ever realized what they had until the series was complete. This worked to our advantage. We had no NY literary rep at the start. After Wolf Worlds came out, Russ Galen - a young agent at Scott Meredith, then - called us and asked if he could represent us. Then he made Del Rey contract for the books one by one, upping the ante each time.

Around about Fleet Of The Damned, he sweetened our kitty by forcing them to give back the foreign rights, which they never really attempted to sell. Then the foreign sales took off like crazy. We kept telling the editors (Owen Locke and Shelly Shapiro) about how well the books were doing overseas - and all the mail we were getting from readers. (snail mail at first, then Compuserve), but they didn't pay much attention. In the Nineties, Del Rey let the books go out of print one by one. Meanwhile, foreign sales were soaring. We were making way more money abroad than at home - and also getting more respect. (In the late Nineties, my foreign editors flew Kathryn and I to Europe for a six-week Continental book tour... London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Munich, Geneva and Moscow... The crowds at the Moscow book-signing alone went around the block.)

Finally, a year or so after Chris died I talked to his widow, Karen, who agreed to let me see if I could get the U.S. rights back. Thanks to Shelly Shapiro, who had by then become a good friend, the deed was done with little effort. Wildside did the U.S. paperback and e-books. Books In Motion bought the audio rights. Immediately, the British sat up and took notice. Called my foreign agent (Danny Baror) and grabbed the UK rights. The other foreign publishers became newly enthused and there has been a flurry of new contracts, new editions and new readers.

I'm hoping that there is going to be a major Sten revival.

One of these days I'll finally get Sten on film. It's not a matter of "if," but "when."

So, as Laurel might tell Hardy, That's my story - and Sten's - and I'm stuck in it.

allan

Allan Cole
Homepage: www.acole.com
Allan's Bookstore: http://tinyurl.com/l9mpr5
Allan's E-Books: http://tinyurl.com/684uos8
Allan's Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/allansten
My Hollywood MisAdventures: http://allan-cole.blogspot.com/
Tales Of The Blue Meanie: http://alcole.blogspot.com/
------------End Quote---------

We'll pick this topic up again very soon, so go look over the Sten Series, especially my reviews on Amazon Kindle.

Read the books with particular attention to the PLOT aspects, and the use of co-incidence in shaping Sten's military career all the way up to admiral.  Then read VORTEX (Sten #7) with particular attention to the science of tornadoes. 

In fact, from Book 1, read with attention to the behavior of tornadoes.  You'll find by Book 7 that the THEME aspect lies within the concept of tornado. 

Ask yourself what is the Romance genre equivalent of a Tornado?  When you find the TORNADO within the structure of the whole STEN SERIES, you'll have the answer to that question, and you'll know what you can do to elevate the reputation of Romance. 

Also as I read the STEN novels on Kindle (all but one, which I got in audiobook) I used the SHARE feature to share significant quotes.  If you "follow" me on Kindle, you can see the excerpts I selected to "share" as I was thinking of doing this series of posts. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com