Showing posts with label Karen Chance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karen Chance. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 02, 2021

Worldbuilding for Multiple Alternate Universes Part 3 - What Makes an Idea Too Crazy

Worldbuilding for Multiple Alternate Universes

Part 3

What Makes an Idea Too Crazy? 

Previous entries in the Worldbuilding for Multiple Alternate Universes Part 4 are:

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/01/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate.html

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/01/worldbuilding-for-multiple-alternate_19.html

And if your Idea is "too crazy" even for a novel crossing multiple alternate universes, how do you sell the novel to traditional publishers?  

Some people view "Love Conquers All" and "Soul Mates" to be ideas way too crazy for mass market.

But reader appetite for types of stories evolves faster than the editorial willingness to invest all that money in manufacturing books and spreading them around where readers might randomly stumble over them (Supermarket shelves, book stores even).

It costs a lot to publish a novel, and the economics demand the prospect of selling a number of units that would return the investment plus a nice profit for the company.

Long before the 1960's, a "profit for the company" was the last thing publishers wanted.  Publishing companies were owned by bigger corporations specifically to lose money, and to be a tax write-off.  This changed when the tax laws were rewritten to classify books stored in warehouses in the same tax category as hammers and tools -- so every year a book is stored, the company that owns the company pays an additional tax.

The whole economics of fiction and non-fiction was changed by a tax law.  

Now books don't get published because they "ought" to be (because of the content), but rather they get published because an acquisitions editor sees a market for them.

If the market isn't visible, the author doesn't get an offer.

So in the last couple of decades the market for what used to be called "everything and the kitchen sink" plotting has become visible.  

This is the sort of novel with worldbuilding that depicts a reality even more complex than our real world.

Classic Soap Opera ladle's onto characters one massive disaster after another - until viewer credulity is stretched almost too far.  These are the sorts of personal disasters that do happen in real life (being widowed while pregnant, being jailed for a crime you didn't commit ) but they happen once to one person, not every few months to the same person year after year.  

Classic Science Fiction depicts an ordinary individual handed an impossible task and accomplishing it by discovering or inventing something that didn't exist before, render the formerly impossible possible.

Classic Romance depicts the forming of a Relationship as a life-altering event, which just like the Science Fiction discovery, renders the formerly impossible life-achievements into possible ones.  

Classic Soap Opera leaves the Characters few free-will choices, few chances to act to change their lives for the better, and when they do have such an opportunity, they choose incorrectly (but the viewer doesn't see the error at first).  

When you combine all three Classic forms with the all-male style Action-Action plotting (fight scene, after chase scene after mortal combat scene, after dire threat scene, after unarmed combat scene, etc), you get a story that you could never have sold into the 1960's market for Science Fiction.

The current editors have been rewarded for acquiring and publishing long series of long novels blending all three Classic forms with action (the more action, the better).

I have reviewed Gini Koch's ALIEN series (16 very long books) consistently, with recommendations to read and study them carefully.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B074C6WPPK

Now, contrast/compare the structure of the ALIEN series with Karen Chance's Cassie Palmer Series, book 10 published in 2020.  



Then contrast both of those with the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher (book 17, Battle Ground,  published September 2020).


FROM AMAZON PAGE:


---quote---

THINGS ARE ABOUT TO GET SERIOUS FOR HARRY DRESDEN, CHICAGO’S ONLY PROFESSIONAL WIZARD, in the next entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling Dresden Files. 

Harry has faced terrible odds before. He has a long history of fighting enemies above his weight class. The Red Court of vampires. The fallen angels of the Order of the Blackened Denarius. The Outsiders.

But this time it’s different. A being more powerful and dangerous on an order of magnitude beyond what the world has seen in a millennium is coming. And she’s bringing an army. The Last Titan has declared war on the city of Chicago, and has come to subjugate humanity, obliterating any who stand in her way. 

Harry’s mission is simple but impossible: Save the city by killing a Titan. And the attempt will change Harry’s life, Chicago, and the mortal world forever.

---end quote--

Gini Koch's character Kitty Kat has an Alien (on Earth) fall madly in love with her -- and she reciprocates vehemently -- and that changes her life, handing her (unbeknownst to her at the time) the impossible task of making peace in the galaxy.  Classic Love Conquers All because of Soul Mates meeting.

Karen Chance's character Cassie Palmer is handed the impossible task of freeing humanity from the ancient gods (Ares, Apollo,), and her love is torn between a Master Vampire and the ancient Merlin, a vigorous Incubus.  She teams up with the Incubus and kills a god, then goes on to settle things for humanity, all because of the power of love in her unique relationship with an Incubus. Classic Love Conquers All, not sure about the Soul Mate aspect.  

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files #17 (Sept 2020) I have yet to read, but I've read all the prior ones in this (absolutely magnificent) Fantasy Series about Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard (hard boiled detective crossed with Have Gun Will Travel gun-for-hire-but-the-good-guy).  Harry is driven by bone-marrow-deep affection for various people in his life, but seems more a free-radical, living a life without his Soul Mate.  Even so, his love does conquer pretty much all the problems that come at him. 

All 3 of these long series of long novels have fascinating main characters pursuing impossible goals against impossible odds and succeeding.

And although the characters are marvelous, the real star of the series is the world building.

Around every plot turn and twist lies a revelation about the true nature of the world the characters live in -- knowledge often won in the heat of battle, magical and otherwise -- and those revelations drive the plot into new vistas.

Keep in mind these series of long books all start with the very close, very tight focus on a character with one, or maybe five, problems to solve just to survive the current threat.  The reader doesn't know how vast and varied the protagonist's world actually is.  The character may have an inkling, but is off by orders of magnitude.

If the first book (or trilogy) doesn't sell well enough, the next contract won't be offered and the series dies.

Keep in mind that how well a first book in a series sells doesn't depend on its content or anything the writer has power over.  

How well a book sells has to do with promotional budget allocated by the publisher - and part of that budget is the cover art, another part precisely where it is distributed and advertised.

How well subsequent books sell has a lot to do with word of mouth (or Facebook) among readers who love that sort of novel.  

Hooking the specific market on a particular novel is the writer's first job.  

Today's market loves scrambled up, competing artistic symbolism, confusion, doubt and what appears to be winning by random thrashing rather than skilled planning.  

It may be too late to start writing a series with these traits embedded in the world building, as the market always shifts with the generations, and with the impression new generations have of the everyday world around them.  

In ten or twenty years - the time it takes to deliver a 25-novel series - tastes will have shifted.

Today, we see a world that just doesn't make sense unless there is some hidden under-layer seething with power and motion, surfacing in apparently random events and disappearing again.  So novels like the Harry Potter Series, and the three mentioned above, all postulate such a parallel or hidden reality unknown to ordinary humans.  All these lavishly built worlds seem completely plausible to today's readers.

What exactly will be next?  What will these series look like to readers 40 years from now? 

Are you writing for that far future reader?  Is your too-crazy-idea simply ahead of its time?  

Consider that in the days when my Romantic Times Award winning novel, DUSHAU, ...




Dushau, Farfetch and Outreach on Kindle:  

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0753LLYTR

...was first published (my first novel that was distributed on supermarket shelves and such stores as Walmart, not just book stores), Science Fiction publishing absolutely rejected adding "Romance" tropes to a Science Fiction novel -- because you couldn't sell it to a defined and identifiable market.  

It was way too-crazy-an-idea.  

But just as Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek as, "Wagon Train To The Stars," I sold DUSHAU as a galactic political adventure.  

That's what you do to sell an Idea that's just way too crazy - you repackage it as something familiar to the acquisitions department, hiding the hook you are planting to grab your intended market deep inside where only the reader will see it.  

Being too crazy to sell means being first with an idea.

If you're first with an innovation in story-telling, you may only make it to a trilogy (or as with Star Trek, 3 seasons, the minimum necessary for syndication in reruns), but subsequent authors may be able to drive the unfolding flower of a new genre to 25 novel series (or as with Star Trek, many other series and movies in that and parallel universes).

Do you want to be a pioneer, and change the world while being changed by it, or do you want to ride a wave started by previous authors?  

Do authors start these waves -- or do readers?  

In our interconnected, online world of social networking, maybe the origin point of the energies of change will continue to shift from the investing business to individual consumer (fanfic readers and writers?).

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com 



Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Reviews 22 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Karen Chance's Cassie Palmer Novels

Reviews 22
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Karen Chance's Cassie Palmer Novels 

I have not yet posted an Index to my reviews here, but this is #22 of the series of reviews about the field of Science Fiction Romance, Paranormal Romance, and related genres and what you can learn by studying various novels "published as" various genres.

I particularly focus on "ingredients" in other fields that can be smoothly blended into a dynamic Romance plot.

The results of a smooth blend are clear in the Historical Romance field.

Historical Romance produced hundreds, maybe thousands, of titles over a span of a couple of decades, and then as those born in the 1970's became book buyers, Historical Romance writers blended Women's Lib into Historical periods -- with some justification, and sometimes as pure fantasy.  Women raised in the Victorian era were portrayed as undaunted feminists -- and sometimes that "worked" for modern readers, and sometimes not so much.

Growing up in an oppressive environment cripples and warps most Personalities, so that the occasional individual who weathers the storm of denigration and negative messaging becomes a social outcast among her compliant peers.

But such defiant individuals have existed in all epochs of human history.

Look to the Biblical story of Dinah, of Deborah, of the several named Yehudit.  Look to the female Saints.

It isn't womanhood per se that determines whether you are outstanding, exceptional, defiant, un-bendable, or in the parlance of the writing craft, A Hero.

The hallmark of most science fiction is that the central character, the Hero or Point of View Character, the protagonist is one of those Unbendable humans who marches to his own drummer.

I haven't seen any research on this, but just scanning the people I know and their life-stories, I can't see any difference in the percentage of those Unbendables who are male vs those who are female.

The Unbendables are rare.  Societies that treasure their Unbendables thrive.  Societies that trash their Unbendables perish quickly.

Parents of an Unbendable usually see they've spawned an Ugly Duckling very early in the child's life.  Some Parents are proud of that kid -- others keep trying to bend them.

To study the Unbendable as a Character, read (and it's a joy and a delight, not like a school assignment task) Karen Chance's series about her Unbendable character, Cassie Palmer.

It's Paranormal Romance, but the Romance plot develops very slowly over the story-arc of the novels.

The 7th novel in the Cassie Palmer series is titled REAP THE WIND.

Cassie Palmer Novels:
Touch the Dark
Claimed by Shadow
Embrace the Night
Curse the Dawn
Hunt the Moon
Tempt the Stars
Reap the Wind (2015)
Ride the Storm

Here's her page on Amazon where you can "follow" her and get an email when a new book comes out.
http://amazon.com/Karen-Chance/e/B001I9Q83A
All these novels are recommended, but they are so well written that you can dip into the series at any point and completely understand the action and romance.

The entire (long) novel is Cassie's increasingly desperate attempts to rescue the guy she loves, a Soul Mate from a very neat, (original) curse ripped from the Arthurian Legend headlines.

This fellow was/is the Merlin of Arthur's Kingdom.

Legend has it Merlin "lived backwards" -- a concept not explained in most Arthurian literature.

The science fiction part of this Fantasy-Romance is the precise, scientific way the Curse is explained and the way to lift the Curse is posited.

Karen Chance has used the best skills of Game Oriented Worldbuilding to create a Magic dimension that makes sense.

The Situation is that long ago the Greek/Roman gods were swept out of our Reality and walled away from us.

The project of building that magical wall was a team effort, spearheaded by one of those Unbendable types, a woman.

Now, another group of women, bent on siezing Power, have decided to bring back one of those gods.  Like most Sorcerer Apprentice thinking, they truly believe they can control the results of their initiative to their own advantage.

Cassie Palmer is more realistic, though almost totally ignorant of the  Magical skills involved.

Cassie has been "chosen" by some kind of Magical Power to fill the (always female) office of Pythia, a Seer who can transcend Time and implement various sorts of Magic, given enough training in youth.

Cassie has not had any of that training.  She's learning as she goes, beset by enemies who leave her no time to learn.

She was raised by a formidable crowd of Vampires, short tempered folks with way more Power than is good for the world.  She learned to become inconspicuous, quiet, un-noticed lest she set off a violent storm among those Vampires.  But she is an Unbendable.

Despite her up-bringing, or perhaps because of it, she arrives at adulthood with the habit of thinking for herself, charting her own course, making her own decisions, and not standing in awe of what appears to be Authority wrapped in Power.

In other words, she is your typical science fiction hero.

She asks pesky questions, finds her own answers, doesn't totally believe anything she's told until she verifies it, plunges ahead with action based on whatever theory she considers most probably correct, and in the process takes a lot of personal, emotional, and physical damage -- and comes back swinging, relying on her next best theory.

She's a Strong Character, in the definition of the publishing industry.

Here are some of my previous posts on publishing's oft-repeated demand for "strong characters" -- a demand most beginning writers mis-interpret.  Karen Chance has gotten it right, so study Cassie Palmer for the traits highlighted in these posts.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/07/index-to-theme-character-integration.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/10/strong-characters-defined-part-1.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/08/strong-character-defined-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/12/theme-plot-integration-part-15.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/12/theme-symbolism-integration-part-1-you.html

And for Romance writers, I particularly recommend:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-every-novel-needs-love-story-part-2.html

The Unbendables are only one sort of Strong Character.

The Unbendable Trait tends to generate fanfic about testing that character to destruction to find out what is inside the Unbendable shell.  That is the origin of much of the fanfic often called "Get Spock."  Or even, "Hurt/Comfort."

Before you can destroy (e.g. Bend) a Character with dramatic impact, you must first convince the reader the Character really is Unbendable, or Strong in some other way.  Towering, Formidable, perhaps justly Famous, or Great.  The Purely Strong Character invites the reader to destroy him.

This is why Superman collapses under the rays of Kryptonite.

But note that when stripped of his Powers, Superman adheres to his values.  How you regard Risk, and how you take Loss indicates whether your Character is Strong or Weak.  Adhering to values despite pain, loss or any other threat is Strong Character.

Every Unbendable Character must have a flaw, a crease, a crack, a weak spot.

Now look at Cassie Palmer's physical appearance.  She is short, built slight, -- wiry strength but no Titan.  She doesn't look formidable.  Physically, she is a mouse.

Then the Power chooses her to be Pythia -- which gives her access to Abilities Beyond Mortal Men.

But she has no clue how to use this Power.  To wield it as she would wish to, she would have had to be raised in the Pythia's household and trained to be the Pythia successor.

The girls who were so raised work to unseat Cassie from the Office of Pythia (i.e. kill her).

And the Pythia's Office itself has enemies out there who are not resting while Cassie learns the ropes. They do politics with explosions, spells, poisons.  They look for definitive solutions to the problem of Cassie Palmer.

The one ally she knows she needs is Merlin.  Her enemies win one by removing his Soul with a Curse that sends it backward in Time, skipping from one era to another, arriving to "inhabit" his own (somewhat immortal) Self, then skipping on --- a little like the 1989-1993 TV Series Quantum Leap.

Headlines are wondrous places to rip dramatic material from -- but old TV Series likewise provide grand opportunities.

Note how this theory explains the legend of Merlin "living backwards" and thus "knowing the future."

Cassie's current strategy in Reap the Wind is to remove the Curse on Merlin by time-teleporting back the one man who has the ability to cast a Curse-Removal-Spell.  The hitch is that she must go with him.

If they can catch up to Merlin at a moment when his future Soul is passing through backwards in time, and get that Curse-Removal-Spell thrown just exactly right, they can save Merlin's life and return to present time with a strong ally who knows a lot more magic than anyone else.

Cassie has limited energy for such Magic Stunts as transporting two people back thousands of years in time, or into the Realm of Faery.  She is kept scrambling and using more energy than she can afford by the former Pythia's students trying to derail her efforts to save Merlin.

REAP THE WIND is one wild time-travel-chase-scene liberally salted with mortal-combat and magic battles.

The action/battle scenes would make wondrous Indiana Jones style film material if this series is ever made into a TV Series or film.

As I've noted on many occasions in these blogs, the trend in novel publishing is toward the same structure that draws millions to theaters, as opposed to the few hundred thousand who buy any given novel in print, e-book or audiobook.

Romance Readers have an insatiable taste for Action today.  REAP THE WIND definitely provides a feast of action.

This novel leaves you eager for #8 in the series titled RIDE THE STORM -- a title that promises more breakneck action between love scenes.  "Follow" Karen Chance on Amazon to be notified when it is available.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com