Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Interview on Sime~Gen for a German Publication

On Facebook I ran into Horst von Allwörden

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001527129395

Who is doing an online fanzine in German!!! 
http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/


The fanzine is looking for writers too.  Here's what Horst said:


The Zauberspiegel is German online magazine on  a non-commercial basis. Some sort of fanzine. We do anything from Science Fiction, Horror, Western, Fantasy, historic fiction, adventure or crime published in any form (from dime novel to movies).

We have an international section: http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=33&Itemid=504.

For further information watch here: http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6106&Itemid=249 or

here: http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7856&Itemid=516

We need writers for the project. We need articles, reviews, stories, interviews. In Short: All things a magazine can use.

Please contact us: info@zauberspiegel-online.de  


Horst says: We do the things bilingual. We have an international section. watch this: http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=33&Itemid=504 or this http://www.zauberspiegel-online.de/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6106&Itemid=249 - Most of these articles and interviews are translated for the German edition


And he wanted to interview me for it.  In fact, he went out of his way to buttonhole me for it.  He would translate what I said into German, using some side-bar material written by Sime~Gen fans on the Facebook Sime~Gen Group. 

OK, I do a lot of email interviews like this, but usually it's very hard to find anything to say in answer to the questions -- the larger the publication, the harder it is to answer their questions. 

I think that's mostly because they have cookbook or generic questions for writers instead of actually knowing what they're doing.

But here's a fan trying to do a good thing for an underserved readership.  So, yes, I told him, I'll do the interview. 

He sent me the questions.  The minute I got around to looking at the questions, I couldn't stop typing at my fastest speed trying to assemble answers. 

Here's the Q&A I sent him.

Zauberspiegel: Moin Jacqueline. Could you please introduce you to our - particularly the German - readers?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg:  On the Twitter #scifichat I usually introduce myself as a widely published professional writer of science fiction/fantasy/romance/ genre mixtures & a professional SF/F Reviewer.  But I will bring up other credentials depending on the topic at hand.  On various social networking "profiles" that want a 100 word biography I generally put the following:

Jacqueline Lichtenberg is creator of the Sime~Gen Universe, primary author of Star Trek Lives!, founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, creator of the term Intimate Adventure, winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction and one of the first Romantic Times Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel.  Her work is now in e-book form, audio-dramatization and on XM Satellite Radio.  She has been sf/f reviewer for The Monthly Aspectarian for 16 years.  With Professor Jean Lorrah, she teaches sf/f writing online via Tarot and Astrology.  Currently, new and old Sime~Gen plus other novels are in e-book, Kindle, and print from Wildside Press.  See http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20 Bio and Bibliography at http://www.simegen.com/jl/ or http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

But some profiles want more, or publications often want a more personal slant, so I put something like the following:

ABOUT ME:

I became hooked on SF in 6th grade when my mother snuck me a book from the "adult" library.  I fought with my High School English teachers about the superiority of the Lensman Series and E. E. Smith's "writing" over that of the "Classics" we were forced to read.  I avoided all English courses in college because I was determined to become an SF writer -- so like many SF writers I knew, I majored in Chemistry.  I've been a member of the N3F since 7th grade, and a member of SFWA since 1969. You'll find me on Linked-In, Facebook, Digg, LiveJournal, blogspot, Google+ and Goodreads plus a few other social networking sites. 

http://jlichtenberg.livejournal.com/profile
http://digg.com/users/JLichtenberg

View Jacqueline Lichtenberg's profile on LinkedIn

http://www.facebook.com/jacqueline.lichtenberg

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/320732.Jacqueline_Lichtenberg 

INTERESTS: From the forefront of nano-technology to the depths of archeology.  From the business of the fiction delivery system to the psychology of audience response.  From the farflung limits of Kabalah to the most personal spiritual experiences.  Jacqueline Lichtenberg novels are known for combining action, adventure, romance, and philosophy into a seamless whole. 

Zauberspiegel: You are a Friend of Darkover and Marion Zimmer Bradley had been one of your mentors during your earlier writings. What did Marion Zimmer Bradley do during this mentoring process? What did she teach you and others?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg:  Well, I'm not sure how many others she did this for (though many of her students went from hopeless fumbling to prolific selling writers), but when she took me on I had sold a short story and completed a novel which she made only a few minor editorial suggestions for. 

That was my "first novel" (first professionally published, not first written), House of Zeor, now called Sime~Gen #1 in its Wildside Press/ Borgo Imprint edition.  It had been rejected by almost every SF publisher in Manhattan when Marion took it to DAW (which was just starting up) and recommended it. 

Don Wollheim (founder of DAW and father of the current owner) rejected it, but said that Doubleday was publishing books like this, and recommended I send it to them.  I did that, and after a year in the slushpile, it was accepted and published in Hardcover by the publisher of Isaac Asimov! 

Much later, Don Wollheim said he regretted rejecting that book (I suppose he'd heard of how it attracted and energized Star Trek fans) and he bought a couple of the Sime~Gen books for Mass Market originals, which was a career first for me.

Meanwhile, I was nursing STAR TREK LIVES! through the barriers to selling anything, even non-fiction, connected with Star Trek.  (that's a long story posted on http://www.simegen.com/jl/IFS~GConnection.html ) forging the connection with Jean Lorrah (who eventually became co-author of a lot of Sime~Gen), and working on the second Sime~Gen novel, my first award winner, UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER (labeled by Wildside as Sime~Gen #2).

Here's where Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me the majority of what I learned from her -- the real breakthrough lessons I try to teach on http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com and http://editingcircle.blogspot.com

UNTO was a much more ambitious piece of writing than House of Zeor which is essentially an 85,000 word short story.  UNTO is much longer, structured differently, with internal climaxes I just couldn't make land in the right spots for that size novel.  To sell a longer novel into that market, I had to get those climaxes at just exactly the correct places and I couldn't DO IT. 

I knew what I had to do, but not how. 

So after much explaining -- by snailmail -- which just didn't work, she took the hands-on approach that I now take with some of my students.  Let me tell you that is the creepiest feeling in the world, an absolute HEADSPINNING, total reality adjustment when a really strong, polished, talented, major force in the writing craft business takes up your words and reshapes characters, scenes, paragraphs, re-chooses words, re-creates the entire imagined world without changing the actual world-building.

After she rewrote a couple of the scenes to make those climactic moments the right "size" and in the right places, I was able to see and understand what she was doing -- in fact, she seemed to feel I understood how she did what she did better than she did. 

But it was still only a preliminary breakthrough in technique. 

For several more novels in Sime~Gen, and in step with her novels (you can figure this out by checking the pub dates in my bibliography which desperately needs updating with my newest publications) we exchanged "dailies" by snailmail.  Each day she would write a chapter in whatever she was writing (usually Darkover) and I'd write a chapter in what I was writing.  We'd each make an extra carbon copy (yes Selectric typewriter, carbon copies, snailmail) and mail it each day. 

Each day I would get a chapter from her -- (in an envelope with a chapter of mine that I had sent her the week before replete with her scribbed commentary).  I'd scribble comments in the margin of her chapter about the crafting of the dialogue, development of the story, spot lagging moments, wordy constructions, suggest what I thought the plot-direction she was going to take would be, and what I thought it should be, the nitty-gritty of milling a first draft into usable copy -- then I'd mail it back to her, together with MY chapter that I wrote that day. 

We exchanged raw, first draft, and exchanged commentary on what had to be changed or fixed to raise the raw material to publishable levels. 

Sometimes we'd include long letters of discussion of plot direction, character development, dramatic possibilities untouched that needed treatment, etc.

Each workday also included rewriting the chapter that had just arrived with commentary, then writing the new chapter.

Marion was known in the industry as one of the most prolific writers, under various pen names, in various genres.  She never missed a beat, and productivity was achieved by this daily discipline.  When she got stuck on a chapter, she'd chuck it all and go to a movie or out for a walk.  She'd work out plot-problems and character-directions while doing laundry, ironing, cooking -- she was raising kids, being supermom as I was. 

The productivity was achieved by producing words at a typist's fastest speed during the few hours at the typewriter.  The real work - the head work - was done while doing chores or sleeping.  This is my main beef with the current USA tax system.  A writer should be able to deduct from income tax the cost of the entire house because it's ALL OFFICE - as is the car, no matter if you're driving around on what other businesses call business.  If you are a writer, you are always writing, especially while asleep.

But that's how I learned under a hands-on tutor.  Eventually, Marion said that she admired my plotting.  And during her struggling with several of her novels, later in this process (I'm not going to tell you which titles), I helped her break her logjam by rewriting some of her scenes.  None of my work made it into print under her name, BUT what did get printed was sufficiently different from first draft that I could see the difference I had made. 

Since then I've done this with some writing students with varying results.  Most writers just can't STAND IT -- for good reason.  But others have acquired that "breakthrough" moment where they come to understand this lesson on a non-verbal level.

Oddly enough, writing, which is all about words, actually occurs on a deep, subconscious, non-verbal level of cognition.  Sometimes it's not possible to learn what you need to master by simply thinking about it, or reading about it.  Sometimes, as in lessons in cursive writing, the teacher has to put her hand over your hand and guide your moves.  Just watching the teacher scribe perfect circles doesn't get your own hand to be able to make those lovely circles.

Zauberspiegel: Your most popular writing is the Sime/Gen series, which you have created in a creative writing seminar. Was the design of a series part of this seminar or is this series sort of a by-product?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg: I did not create Sime~Gen in a writing seminar. 

In fact, I've never been in a writing seminar except as a teacher.

However, you might be referring to the fact that the first Sime~Gen stories ever written were done as excersizes for a correspondence course in writing that I did when I finally came to where I had to begin selling.  I had a husband, a kid and another on the way, and financial issues, so I knew I had to jumpstart my writing career.  I signed up for the overpriced correspondence course in writing and screenwriting, which purported to pertain to science fiction, but actually did not.

The salesman (very different sort of people from those who administered the school or those working writers who moonlighted "teaching" in the school) promised you'd sell your first story after the 4th lesson (lessons were one a month over 2 years I think it was).  NOBODY did that, and the school was sued and eventually I think either went out of business or got sold to some other owners.

I, however, did sell my first story which was the homework for the 4th lesson.

That happened because I knew more about writing than the instructors and I knew my market, my field of science fiction (that the teachers thought was just like any other genre which it is not and was not). 

I had already done professional level, advanced, and detailed worldbuilding for Sime~Gen.  I had the characters down pat.  I knew the conflicts, the long-range (thousands of years) future-history I wanted to construct, and I had the theory of reincarnation designed so that I could tell that multi-generation saga.

But there was a very important thing that I needed to learn.  I knew that I had to do it, I knew what it was (because I'd been reading books on how to write since High School), I had been trying to duplicate the effect I could see in stories I admired, and I had trained myself to do it -- but I just couldn't get it RIGHT.

How had I trained other than reading books on how to write a stage play, a TV screenplay, a filmscript, a short story, and a novel?  (I'd read every book in my local public library on this topic, plus several years worth of issues of The Writer magazine).  Reading about it, and trying to do it, just didn't get it to work for me. 

Other than reading about writing, I had also (quite by accident) stumbled into a marvelous training method.  When I was 10 years old, my father bought the family our first (manual) typewriter.  He was a professional teletype operator, and he taught me to touch type in the same way professionals had trained him.  That's why I could type all day at Marion Zimmer Bradley speeds, and to this day type all day on the computer, and never suffer carpal tunnel syndrome.  It's all in your wrist position -- and it's all in that very first moment you sit down facing a keyboard.  It's in the discipline, the smacks and verbal demands - sit up, hands just so, head just so. 

As with a ballet dancer, it's training that does it, not reading about it.  And the training has to soak in so deep it's subconscious.  You never know you're doing it if it's trained in.

If you have to FORCE yourself to do it, the tension will give you carpal tunnel.  You get the same effect in learning long-range driving.  If you sit tensed at the wheel constantly forcing yourself into "the" position, you'll be groggy and swerving all over the road after 500 miles in one day.

Writing is the same way.  You can't do it at commercial speeds if you're tensed up trying to "do it right."  "Right" has to be trained in so it functions beneath awareness. 

I trained in writing on that first typewriter by copy-typing several of my most favorite novels.  A. E. Van Vogt's SLAN, and Andre Norton's STAR RANGERS were among them.  I later did the same with some of Marion's work.  I have found this to be the MOST essential training in writing craft it is possible to find anywhere.  And today it doesn't even cost paper and ink to do it. 

So that's what I brought to the correspondence course.  I had the universe, the characters, the STYLE (from copy-typing), and the knowledge of my field of science fiction from having read everything published in the field from long before I was born to that current day.  Until the late 1960's it was possible to read everything published in science fiction each month, and have lots of time left over! 

Not only that, but I had studied the editors working in the science fiction field.  I sliced-n-diced every editorial in the SF magazines.  I understood the people, and I was in touch with their circles via science fiction fandom (a social network functioning by snailmail).  I knew both the editors and the readers, personally and in depth.

So what did I learn from the correspondence course?  I learned the single most important thing that differentiates the amateur from the professional writer, scene structure.

It's scene structure as a building block for story structure. 

I had already learned the importance of pacing, and by direct correspondence with A. E. Van Vogt, I learned (he taught me) the rule that he had always followed that worked.  7 line paragraphs, 700 word scenes.

It sounds simple, but it isn't easy to do. 

The correspondence course gave me the clues I needed to master "The Scene" -- and so combining that with everything else I'd learned, I was able to sell my first story to Fred Pohl at WORLDS OF IF MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE FICTION.  (Fred later moved to Bantam and bought STAR TREK LIVES! -- it's  not so much about who you know as it is about who knows you.)

Lesson 4 was to study a magazine market and write for that magazine, to write a story like other stories they'd published. 

Since I wasn't starting from scratch, I KNEW my magazines, I was able to think like Fred Pohl and write a story in my universe which exemplified one of his editorials on a deep thematic level. 

I can easily understand how someone who "wants to be a writer" could never do that.  In order to do it, you must already "be" a write -- i.e. to have studied, read about writing, tried it, failed, trained in various ways such as copy-typing favorite material, taken acting courses, whatever works for you.

Then a course like that can put the finishing touch on your training. 

There's one other thing I learned later in that correspondence course that I've passed on in http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com -- and it's laced through many of my posts there.  THEMATIC STRUCTURE.  (search on theme or thematic and you probably will find most of my posts on the subject).

Having grasped the secrets of thematic structure (I already understood theme, though they don't teach that so much in High School anymore), I redesigned the future-history structure of Sime~Gen to the current wheels-within-wheels symmetry that I've been using.

So, no, Sime~Gen did not originate within any kind of seminar. 

At the time I took the correspondence course, I had developed and fleshed out several major "worlds" for SF series, and to date of that group I've only used 1 - Sime~Gen (and it's not finished).

Zauberspiegel: Can Sime/Gen be called a vampiremyth in SF garment? Or would this be inadequate?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg: Wholly inadequate.  I'd say it's more Science Fiction in a Vampire garment.  But even that doesn't begin to scratch the surface.

It's not totally untrue to indicate the core themes of Sime~Gen as being related to the driving conflict we are seeing in the modern Vampire stories, especially Vampire Romance.

Vampire fans generally love Sime~Gen if they prefer Vampire stories that are not horror-genre.  Those who seek horror-genre Vampires really dislike Sime~Gen because the worldbuilding behind Sime~Gen is more like "Star Trek" in that it is the optimistic view of the universe.

The Sime~Gen Universe is built on the concept of the Human as essentially Good.  Given no restraints and no outside control, the Human tendency is to do GOOD.  The Natural Human is constructive, not destructive, and we tend to Love not Hate.

This is an assumption about Human Nature most people need to view via a Science Fiction lens.  It's bizarre.  It doesn't match up with what we think we see in the real world around us.  It's fiction.

But as such, it makes a terrific cornerstone for a science fiction worldbuilding exercise.

Another bizarre assumption behind Sime~Gen worldbuilding is (as with Star Trek) that the universe is essentially benign, a comfortable and welcoming natural home for the basic Human. 

Humans belong in Nature - so there can never be the classic fictional conflict source of "Man Against Nature" -- which is the basis for the biggest best sellers.

The worldbuilding assumption (never overtly stated) is that the physical Human body, the Human Soul, and Nature (the universe around us) is all of one piece, wholly and totally integrated, absolutely harmonious.  This situation exists because God is constantly creating this universe.  We are a song that God is singing -- all in perfect harmony. 

It's only in recent years that I've learned that my theory here has been expounded by legitimate philosophers who know more about it all than I ever will.  I took a course where I learned that the Soul enters reality through the dimension of Time (which is why it doesn't have any physical dimensions and so  can't be detected by science). 

I wrote about that in 4 parts of my Review column, and those columns are posted at:
http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2007/index.html
(there are links to all the parts of the columns titled THE SOUL-TIME HYPOTHESIS)

These concepts at the base of the fictional construct Sime~Gen (never revealed in the fiction overtly) run counter to the basic premise of Horror Genre.

Horror's basic premise is that you have to fight Evil, but you can't win; the most you can do is chain it down in a box and shackle it with Holy symbols, or run away and hide.

 The premise of Sime~Gen also flies in the face of every science fiction universe assumption that I'd ever read prior to inventing this one.

The essence of "science fiction" is to postulate the unthinkable and then extrapolate how humans would cope with that reality.  What if everything you think you know is false?  Then how do you rebuild your psychological grip on reality enough to function day to day?  That's what SF is about - humans coping with the unknown and the unknowable.

Another "rule" of general fiction that Sime~Gen violates is the ancient adage that "Everything changes except human nature."  That adage became famous in the genre of Historical Fiction. 

One basic cornerstone postulate behind Sime~Gen is:

The Sime~Gen Universe
where a mutation makes the
evolutionary division into
male and female pale by comparison.

Sime~Gen is not "Post Apocalyptic" though that's the only Category Label extant that it's generally tossed into. 

However, the novels that wear that label "Post Apocaplyptic" are often very downbeat, about the desperate struggle to survive in a destroyed, and shattered world, about the horrors of not having modern technology, about looking backwards to an unattainable golden age instead of building a better, new golden age.  It's a term that's come to be applied to stories about barely surviving in a hopeless world which is utterly hostile to the human spirit, and which breaks the human spirit. 

You find this in many Fantasy worlds built on Magic, such as Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels (much admired by me).  The characters seem to have had their self-esteem drubbed out of them by a hostile world.  In such Fantasy worlds, at some time in  The Past, there was a civilization that had mastered the intricacies of Magic.  They wrote down their miracle-working in grimmoirs and such Books, and bound those books with spells and secrets.  "Now" all is lost, and the only way to do such "miracles" for yourself is to find the magical stone or gadget these prior people made, or find their grimmoirs.  Not one character ever thinks to him/herself, "well if they could do it, we can, too" and then just invents SOMETHING NEW!!!  They're always trying to copy or re-create instead of thinking for themselves, as would a person with a healthy self-esteem. 

The Sime~Gen characters I write about are of a different breed.  While there is a Householding that specializes in archeology and digging up ancient technology (in House of Zeor they're exploring what a "camera" can do), most of the people in this new society think for themselves and invent things, never considering that they can't do something just because they don't know how.

Much of the Sime~Gen redevelopment follows the same course that Ancient humans followed -- for the same compelling reasons.  But there are departures due to their physiological and psychological differences from Ancient Humans.

The PreHistoric event that generates the Sime~Gen situation is not an "apocalypse" as generally depicted in Science Fiction and Fantasy novels -- but its opposite but I don't think there is an antonym.

And it turns out the actual, literal, and traditional meaning of the word Apocalypse exactly fits Sime~Gen -- while the novels the word is generally applied to depict the opposite of the actual meaning.

Here's a nice discussion of the origin of the concept apocalypse on a WIKI:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080801151048AAxtLTv 

The article starts with the core of the matter:
------------QUOTE---------
Apocalypse (Greek: ?p???????? Apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil"), is a term applied to the disclosure to certain privileged persons of something hidden from the majority of humankind. Today the term is often used to refer to the end of the world, which may be a shortening of the phrase apokalupsis eschaton which literally means "revelation at the end of the æon, or age".
---------END QUOTE--------------

And it goes on to describe the application to Christian visions -- and of course that came from the Jewish origins.

The essence of the reference is to the Biblical descriptions of the Messianic Age, and to the turmoil that is prophesied to precede that age.

At the time I created Sime~Gen I hadn't learned any of this "apocalyptic" stuff.

At that time, the SF literature was dominated by Atomic Bomb apocalypses, and all of my favorites were about human mutants Andre Norton's STARMAN'S SON etc.

All of those were cautionary tales (like Silent Spring) or outright Horror Stories (humans are so evil at heart that left to themselves they will destroy themselves - stupid or evil humans in a hostile environment.)

So, being a science fiction writer, I postulated the opposite.

Instead of God cursing humans with utter destruction for our essential shortcomings, WHAT IF ....

The essence of science fiction is "What if....?" or "If only ....?"  or "If this goes on ...."  I learned from reading about how to write that the best SF combines all 3 of those speculations.  So I did.

WHAT IF - humanity is good, but stubbornly refusing to learn compassion?

IF ONLY - humans would become sensitive to the pain of others

IF THIS GOES ON - God will Bless us with a very definitive lesson.  A lack of compassion will become a capital offense. 

So in Sime~Gen, because of God's love for us and his Universe, God blesses us.  If you postulate that God is real (a terrible stretch for some people, but this is SF after all -- no pain, no gain)  -- and that the Soul is real, then Death can be only temporary.  Reincarnation could be real because God, being rather sensible, would recycle these complicated creations called people. 

Redesigning the Universe so that a lack of compassion is a capital offense is just God's method of training us in a lesson we really do want to master. 

It's a lesson in how to make life easy, how to get along, how to live without destroying that which supports life (our ecology - Sime~Gen is an answer to the problem of using up all Earth's oil for energy and not being able to restart civilization after collapse of this one). 

So the Souls of these characters have undergone a whole series of short, ugly lives terminating in horrible deaths until the lessons of compassion are driven deep into the fabric of their beings.

Of course, being human, they don't all learn at the same pace -- so there are some dunces in this class. 

The worldbuilding theory is that the bell shaped distribution curve for compassion among humans has had it's peak shifted maybe 10% toward the compassion end of the X axis.  Because of this, the events in the novel Zelerod's Doom and the subsequent year or two in the Sime~Gen chronology are plausible.  Given the same problem today among Ancient humans (us), the events would not have gone that well at all. 

So you might say Sime~Gen redefines the label "Post Apocalyptic Literature."   And Sime~Gen redefines the label "Vampire Novel." 

Zauberspiegel: Sime/Gen tells the story of the Simes and Gens, a society of two different types of humans. How do you refer to the two ... are they different types of humans? Races? Species? Since the younger readers in particular will very likely not know the novels, please tell us more about it. What is this society like? What are the relationships between the two of them like?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg: The Sime~Gen Mutation split humanity into Simes and Gens. 

Some Simes are male, some female.
Some Gens are male, some female.

Children of either or both Sime and Gen are neither Sime nor Gen, but just children. 

The child of 2 Simes has about a 1/3 chance of turning into a Gen at puberty.

The child of 2 Gens has about a 1/3 chance of turning into a Sime at puberty.

The child of a Sime and a Gen -- all bets are off.  (and yes, they interbreed, which makes some dynamite stories!)

I used the terms Sime and Gen only until fans discussing the universe on a Listserv (which has moved to Facebook Sime~Gen Group) kept running into the English syntactical need for an equivalent of the word Gender.

So we did what Jean and I are generally prone to do -- we let the fans make suggestions and then we took a vote on what the term equivalent to Gender should be.  We have always let the readers guide the direction of the stories, and fans who write stories in this universe (which we publish online) sometimes see their additions to the universe incorporated in print.

The word "larity" won -- I'm not sure of the etymology, but I suspect it has something to do with Lateral Tentacles.

You see, Simes have tentacles on their arms, Gens don't.

Since the stories are scattered among thousands of years of human history, the character's assumptions about their own Nature changes.

Nobody knows (and the universe premise is that the characters will never know, which is part of their problem) what the actual cause of this mutation was.  They do know that Ancients looked like Gens (some statues survive).

So, since no Sime has ever zlinned (Simes have senses Gens don't) an Ancient, it was at first (pre DNA science) assumed that Gens were Ancients and Simes were the different ones.

As their assumptions change, their society shifts to adjust. 

After the collapse of Ancient (pre-mutation) civilization, about a thousand years of chaos intervenes.  This is pretty standard in human history's archeological record - when a major civilization such as Ancient Rome collapses, it takes about a thousand years to get things together again. 

During that interval, the afforementioned short, ugly lives are lived with horrible ugly deaths until compassion is learned.

As compassion is learned, a third mutation begins to survive puberty -- the channels, who are Simes with two nervous systems instead of one.

In Jean Lorrah's novel FIRST CHANNEL, one such channel discovers (because of the Gen he loves) that he can take selyn (the energy of life) from a Gen without killing the Gen and later give that selyn (channel it) to another Sime who can then survive a month without killing a Gen.

The problem humanity faces is that Gens produce abundant amounts of life-energy (selyn) but their bodies use very little, if any.  Simes don't produce any selyn in their tissues, but their bodies run on selyn not calories (they don't eat much except to replace protein and minerals to keep cells alive and replaced).

When a Sime takes selyn from a Gen, the Gen dies.

Of course, the other Gens aren't happy about that.  Wars ensue.  Wipe out all the Simes and that solves the problem. Nope, the children of Gens still turn into Simes and form bands of Freeband Raiders, killing for the fun of it.

Some Freeband Raider gang that gets too big to move around settles in and forms a Sime government, domesticating Gens by breeding them in pens and doling them out to tax-paying Simes.

They defend their "Territory" -- and before long the landscape is dotted with odd-shaped Sime Territories surrounded by Gen Territory, and the border wars begin.

Into this situation comes The First Channel (son of a Genfarm owner where they breed Gens for the Kill). 

In the direct sequel, CHANNEL'S DESTINY, we see how the Forts begin to form, little walled villages of Simes and Gens who live together using channels as intermediaries.

In THE FARRIS CHANNEL we see how the Forts can't survive and how they evolve into the living-groups called Householdings that eventually band together into an organization called the Tecton -- which evolves in ZELEROD'S DOOM into the Modern Tecton (a government that manages both Sime Territory and eventually Gen Territory) -- and there are novels yet to be written about the Interstellar Tecton.


Zauberspiegel: You often worked together with Jean Lorrah. How did you meet? How did you begin to write together? What is it like to work so close with another person for such a long time? How do you split up the work on your writings? Did your cooperation only cover Sime/Gen?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg:
I first encountered Jean's writing during the compilation of STAR TREK LIVES!  Jean had co-authored a STAR TREK story which we wanted to include in a center section of STAR TREK LIVES featuring fan fiction -- no fan fiction devoted to any TV, film or book series had ever been professionally published, aired, or discussed in professional journalistic media of any kind at that time. 

It turned out that the fanfiction section would make the book too long, (and yes, they were against the concept of fanfic, and there were nasty copyright issues with Paramount which owned Star Trek at that time).  So it wasn't included.

However, to their utter astonishment STAR TREK LIVES! was a best seller and went 8 printings -- we blew the lid on Star Trek fandom!  So Sondra Marshak took on another partner, Myrna Culbreth and did the anthology STAR TREK: THE NEW VOYAGES (and some sequels, plus some original Trek novels) while I went on developing Sime~Gen.

When HOUSE OF ZEOR first came out in Hardcover, I sold copies I had bought myself to Star Trek fans I knew via snailmail magazines and groups.  I sold it on a money back guarantee (the hardcover was exorbitantly expensive).  The guarantee was only to Spock fans.  People who liked Trek for reasons other than Spock were not my target readership for HOUSE OF ZEOR (though McCoy fans were the target of UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER).

I sold over 60 copies of the hardcover on the guarantee and never had one returned.

Jean Lorrah, however, was not so much a Spock fan as a Surak fan.

So HOUSE OF ZEOR both worked and didn't work for her.  She wrote a review in a fanzine titled Vampire In Muddy Boots calling House of Zeor a novel that was flawed in the way of typical first novels.

She was a professional writer at that time, but hadn't sold a novel, and didn't know the "flaws" evident in first novels are there not because the author can't do any better, but because publishing houses would BUY a novel that was a first novel that did not have those "flaws."  Catch-22.

Very soon after the publication of House of Zeor, my mailbox exploded with mail.  I couldn't handle it all and found myself writing the same thing again and again.  So I started making as many carbon copies as I could and putting them out in circulating lists (asking each person to forward it to another on the list).

That didn't work well, and before I knew it, Betty Herr had taken over creating a mimeographed fanzine Ambrov Zeor. 

For the first issue, we wanted to publish Jean Lorrah's insightful review, so I wrote to her and asked permission.  Within months she'd sent in several fanzine stories set in Sime~Gen -- and soon after that we met at a Star Trek/Media convention where she showed me the outline for a longer story.

I loved it, and told her to do a couple chapters and an outline and I'd submit it to Doubleday as by Jean Lorrah and Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

They bought it but it was way too long, so it had to be split and became both FIRST CHANNEL and CHANNEL'S DESTINY -- there's a third story in that trilogy which we might do someday as a screenplay.  The events in that third book are summarized in THE FARRIS CHANNEL.

If you are now thoroughly confused, you may want to look at the official chronology in the order in which they happen in Sime~Gen history, rather than publication order.
http://www.simegen.com/CHRONO1.html 

So for FIRST CHANNEL and CHANNEL'S DESTINY Jean wrote the first draft of a chapter, and sent it to me (usually daily, but sometimes in chunks) and I would retype the chapter, making changes to the background and tweaking wording.  She would rewrite my rewrite and I'd do a final draft from that.  We did all the chapters, then smoothed the book as a whole. 

For ZELEROD'S DOOM I first drafted and she second drafted -- she decided she just couldn't cope with my rough-drafting method (which I've since changed to require less rewriting). 

So recently we've been brainstorming what happens and writing independently -- but these works are still collaborations, and as coherently interwoven into telling the future-history story as possible. 

We have very different world-views, but Sime~Gen is not a series but a universe -- to tell its story you must have a lot of worldviews included.  Hence the fanfiction is an integral part of the experience of reading Sime~Gen.

Read a Sime~Gen published novel, read some related fanfiction posted on simegen.com/sgfandom/  -- then re-read that published novel and you'll find you're reading a totally different novel.  That effect makes the published novels worth their price -- even the price of the audiobook versions.

Zauberspiegel: From the series only "The Haus of Zeor" (Dt: "Das Haus Zeor") and "Unto Zeor, Forever" ("Für Zeor auf ewig") had been published in German. When the Moewig Verlag cancelled its SF-paperback program, there were no follow ups (something I deeply regret). Was there no interest in publishing further books from this series? Are you trying to find a German publisher right now?
Jacqueline Lichtenberg: At this point, we're not actively searching for a German publisher.

Alas the Moewig Verlag translations (you did see the discussion of their cover art on the Sime~Gen Group?) were highly inaccurate, misleading, etc.  We do have some fans in Germany (mostly through Trek Fandom) and thankfully they read English.  However, their outcry is the loudest.

With ebooks and audible.com versions being instantly available worldwide, the pressure to do translations has abated.

I suspect an opportunity with a real fan who is able to do good translating would be irresistible! 



Zauberspiegel: In the USA the series was not only continued, it was pretty succesful and had and still has a big fandom, which is also very active. The series formed to a whole universe that does not only involve you and Jean Lorrah, but that is actively involved and where fanfiction plays an important part. How did this fandom form?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg: How did Sime~Gen fandom form?  I couldn't honestly say it ever FORMED.  It's an amorphous sprawl of happy role players who just love bouncing ideas around and rewriting the established Sime~Gen Universe exactly as Star Trek fans (me, too, with Kraith) rewrote Star Trek.

The fans create all these alternate universes that I just totally adore, and another one just started bouncing some ideas around on the Sime~Gen Group on facebook.

Remember those 60 copies of HOUSE OF ZEOR that I sold on a money back guarantee?  Well they were to Spock fans, who were mostly fans of my Kraith Series of Star Trek fanfic ( http://simegen.com/fandom/startrek/  -- and the reason they knew me was from reading fanzines, in which many of them also wrote stories.

I drew a bead (aimed) directly at that nerve that Spock's character twanged in those writers, and they responded to Sime~Gen the same way they responded to Trek -- the reached out their hands, grabbed the wet clay of my universe, and remolded it.

And that's how Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me -- molding my words with her hands, running my words through her typewriter, kneading them as you knead bread. 

The Star Trek fan writers sent me Sime~Gen stories they'd written.

When you've got a tiger by the tail, there's nothing to do but swarm aboard and ride it.  So I sent the stories to the editor of Ambrov Zeor (which was various people at various times) and she published them. 

OK, it wasn't quite that simple.  Before I would allow anything to be published in Ambrov Zeor, I had to make sure it met the highest professional standards of craftsmanship I knew how to meet.  So often a fan written Sime~Gen story would go through 3-5 rewrites before it went to the editor and copyediting (and more little tweaks and twiddles) -- the exact same process any professional publishing house uses.

By doing this, we trained a lot of writers in the craft, and several editors, two of whom are working professionally now on the basis of what they learned then.  I can think of two of the writers who have sold professionally, also.  But many fan writers just don't want to write professionally -- not that they don't want to turn out high precision craftsmanship, but that their subject matter isn't geared to the commercial markets.

That squeezes a lot of material into the fanfic market which is now online with all kinds of fanfic spun off from TV shows.  Many of our writers still write in those venues.

Another phenomenon that I've been following in aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com is the Indie publishers and e-publishers and Indie writers doing their own works.  This is a kind of creativity that had no outlet when so many were writing Sime~Gen fanfic. 

At one time there were 5 separate Sime~Gen fanzines publishing, and consulting with each other to coordinate which conventions which issues would debut at.

Most of that material that we have been able to clear rights for now resides on simegen.com/sgfandom/  for free reading. 

Also in that section of the simegen.com domain you will find a large amount of my own work -- an early draft of UNTO ZEOR, FOREVER so you can learn how a novel can morph before publication, plus some unpublished work.

There is also that first short story I sold, OPERATION HIGH TIME. 

And there's new fanfiction going up in two sections. 


Zauberspiegel:
Is there something like a "bible" for the series that is guiding the people who are involved in fanfiction? If there is, what does this bible contain?

Jacqueline:
No, there's nothing written down to guide writers.  We did do a "bible" for the Kraith stories because at one time there were 50 people creating Kraith, but I don't think we've got that many working in Sime~Gen (I could be wrong; haven't counted).

I honestly wouldn't know how to assemble a "bible" for Sime~Gen writers. I'd say read and re-read the published novels in various orders, and come to the Sime~Gen Group on Facebook, ask questions. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Sunday, May 27, 2012

DOJ Settlement Comment (wip)


To
John Read
Chief Litigation III Section
Antitrust Division
US Department of Justice
450 5th Street, NW
Suite 4000
Washington DC 20530

Dear Mr. Read,

I write to offer a comment on the possible settlement of litigation against various publishers and Apple.

As an author, my grave concern is that the DOJ's case may have the unintended consequence of undermining authors' copyright in two ways.

1. Copyright owners (authors) have the exclusive right to set the price for which they will sell their work.

2. Copyright owners have the right to not use or exploit their copyright, for some or all of the term of the copyright.

It appears to me that there is an erosion both of those rights and protections for copyright owners, and also "an entrenched customer expectation" that authors should not be entitled to those rights.

My impression is that Amazon's effectively taxpayer-subsidized price of $9.99 is an imposed "fixed price. Moreover, authors who had pre-existing contracts with publishers had no opportunity to object to the retroactive imposition of other conditions such as Amazon's "account sharing" and "Lending" which effectively means that –allegedly-- in a few cases, one e-book is paid for and up to ten copies of that e-book could be "shared" through Amazon.

Forcing copyright owners to sell up to ten e-books for the price of one via Amazon is not what I call "price competition" and it is not in keeping with a copyright owner's right to control the sale and pricing of her own work.

Pressure has also apparently been applied to erode a copyright owners right not to release an e-book version of a paper book at the time of their own choosing.

VII 104 Part d. of the Settlement appears to grant Amazon the right to duplicate, publish and distribute electronic books at will, on Amazon's terms.


Should the original copyright owners, the authors, not be consulted about this assignment of their copyrights? What protections are envisaged for authors, if Amazon uses their intellectual property as loss leaders to promote Kindle sales and paid "Prime" memberships?

If the Court wishes to punish the Publishers, perhaps it would be better to return all e-book rights to all authors, and allow those authors to renegotiate their e-book rights either with the Publishers, or directly with Amazon, or with Google or Apple or Microsoft etc.

I believe that any restitution paid to e-book purchasers would set an unfortunate precedent. My opinion is that purchasers should not receive a windfall "restitution" for e-book purchases they made willingly and voluntarily. The customers were not deceived. They were not obliged to purchase e-books at the advertised price if that price was more than they were prepared to pay.

Restitution would send an unhelpful message to the public and to authors. Moreover, it would be costly to administer, and the individual payouts would be small.

Please consider instead, suggesting that any Settlement money (if the DOJ prevails) should be used to fund public education about copyright and copyright infringement, and/or action against copyright infringers of e-books.

This would be fair to the majority of members of the public who are honest and pay for their e-books, it would be fair to authors and publishers. And if piracy and plagiarism could be reduced, the true cost to publishers of e-books ought to come down. Everyone would win.

That said, as an author, I am extremely concerned by the implication that the DOJ should dictate the price range of e-books to authors and publishers regardless of other fixed costs that publishers and authors have to cover through legal sales, regardless of the length or the book, or the amount of time and effort that went into the content.

The DOJ should not be able to mandate that copyright owners assign publishing and other rights to Amazon without negotiation and consent.

Yours sincerely,

Rowena Cherry.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Writing and Life

How do you cope with the periods when real-life events make it hard to write? I'm presently not thinking so much of mundane distractions that occasionally eat up so much time they threaten to squeeze out the writing. I'm thinking more of distressing or outright sad events such as a car accident, serious financial trouble, illness or death in the family, or a terrible disaster dominating the news. Things that tend to overshadow one's thoughts and undercut the will to work on fiction. In my case, this past weekend, our aging Saint Bernard had a health crisis, which, while it lasted, made the novella I've been working on seem like a futile effort. (The vet prescribed some pills that seem to have him back to normal for now, so the immediate worry has passed.) After 9-11, some authors commented that they felt unable to write frivolous fiction in the face of such a national catastrophe. Oddly, I've realized I feel just the opposite. I wish I DID have the gift for writing humorous, frothy stories. When swamped by a real-life worrying or sad event, I find that the dangers and griefs of my fictional characters look thin and unreal by contrast. (Not other people's characters—I can still READ a sad or suspenseful novel by a talented author with appreciation.) How can I put serious effort into creating these imaginary people with their phantasmal troubles when live people close to me are suffering real problems? Times like that sap my writing energy, so I have to push myself to put words on the screen—words that just seem to lie there inertly because they can't measure up to the seriousness of real life. I wouldn't feel the same way about a light or humorous story. Creating characters and situations meant to be amusing rather than emotionally stirring wouldn't feel like neglecting or even insulting live people going through actual crises. Writing frothy fiction would offer a welcome distraction about which I wouldn't have to feel inadequate or guilty. Margaret L. Carter Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

How To Marry A Rich Man



This was posted on Google+ by a photographer:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107023475113646570269/posts 

But it raises the quintessential Romance Writer's Question -- How To Marry Rich (or above one's station in life).

Here's what Baber Afzal
Film Maker, Experimentalist and an HDR/Portrait Photographer
Posted (I've no idea if this particular CEO actually said this, but it doesn't matter for this exercise).

-----------QUOTE--------------
A reply from CEO of J.P. Morgan to a pretty girl seeking a rich husband


A young and pretty lady posted this on a popular forum:

Title: What should I do to marry a rich guy?

... I'm going to be honest of what I'm going to say here.

I'm 25 this year. I'm very pretty, have style and good taste. I wish to marry a guy with $500k annual salary or above.

You might say that I'm greedy, but an annual salary of $1M is considered only as middle class in New York.

My requirement is not high. Is there anyone in this forum who has an income of $500k annual salary? Are you all married?

I wanted to ask: what should I do to marry rich persons like you?

Among those I've dated, the richest is $250k annual income, and it seems that this is my upper limit.

If someone is going to move into high cost residential area on the west of New York City Garden(?), $250k annual income is not enough.

I'm here humbly to ask a few questions:
1) Where do most rich bachelors hang out? (Please list down the names and addresses of bars, restaurant, gym)
2) Which age group should I target?
3) Why most wives of the riches are only average-looking? I've met a few girls who don't have looks and are not interesting, but they are able to marry rich guys.

4) How do you decide who can be your wife, and who can only be your girlfriend? (my target now is to get married)

Ms. Pretty

A philosophical reply from CEO of J.P. Morgan:

Dear Ms. Pretty,
I have read your post with great interest. Guess there are lots of girls out there who have similar questions like yours. Please allow me to analyse your situation as a professional investor.

My annual income is more than $500k, which meets your requirement, so I hope everyone believes that I'm not wasting time here.

From the standpoint of a business person, it is a bad decision to marry you. The answer is very simple, so let me explain.

Put the details aside, what you're trying to do is an exchange of "beauty" and "money" : Person A provides beauty, and Person B pays for it, fair and square.

However, there's a deadly problem here, your beauty will fade, but my money will not be gone without any good reason. The fact is, my income might increase from year to year, but you can't be prettier year after year.

Hence from the viewpoint of economics, I am an appreciation asset, and you are a depreciation asset. It's not just normal depreciation, but exponential depreciation. If that is your only asset, your value will be much worse 10 years later.

By the terms we use in Wall Street, every trading has a position, dating with you is also a "trading position".
If the trade value dropped we will sell it and it is not a good idea to keep it for long term - same goes with the marriage that you wanted. It might be cruel to say this, but in order to make a wiser decision any assets with great depreciation value will be sold or "leased".

Anyone with over $500k annual income is not a fool; we would only date you, but will not marry you. I would advice that you forget looking for any clues to marry a rich guy. And by the way, you could make yourself to become a rich person with $500k annual income.This has better chance than finding a rich fool.

Hope this reply helps.

signed,
J.P. Morgan CEO

---------END QUOTE-------

My comment was:

There's a question that's gone unasked here, and the CEO POV almost captures the issue but not quite.  "What qualities do high-income jobs imbue into a prospect that "I" (the not-so-rich pretty one) would find attractive?"  In other words, what do I need in a husband that would inevitably cause him to be a high-income-earner?

The CEO worked the problem from the high-income-earner's POV, but not from the low-income-earner's POV.

And it occurs to me to wonder if the pretty woman was actually a low income earner.

Which begs the question, why does income-status (or asset status) difference matter in marriage?

Or does it matter, really? 

We've seen all this mulled over in thousands of "trash romances" -- read-and-toss romances, all cut from the same cloth. 

And we've seen it tackled in long Romances, with wide, deep, wrenching themes, or in Fantasy Universes where the marriage twists the course of history for several civilizations.

This is an issue in today's world where we are wrestling with whether human cultures actually create CLASS DIFFERENCES inevitably, or should we strive to erase "CLASS" from social structure? 

Crossing "Class" lines for marriage in any culture is an Alien Romance -- it's romance with someone so different they may as well not be human.  Well, you could probably make a case for that for any male/female marriage, Venus and Mars and all that.  Add a class barrier (or a age gap) and you're talking Alien Romance. 

Is there even really such a thing as "CLASS" -- as a permanent attribute of a human being.  (My Fair Lady)

What this pretty woman was pondering was the methodology of changing her CLASS by an act of will.

She may be unable to answer the question because it's not framed well.

The marriage "transaction" is (as we noted last week) one of GIVING and RECEIVING -- not TAKING and RECEIVING. 

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html

The question the CEO was dancing around is, "What have you got to offer in return for wealth?" 

What have you got that wealth does NOT have? 

If you would RECEIVE you must first GIVE -- and what the CEO was perceiving was an attempt to TAKE instead of GIVING.

In a real Soul-Mate match between someone hugely wealthy and someone not wealthy, usually you find that the not-wealthy one brings some talent, ability, or magic to the Relationship that actually causes the entire family's system to function. 

"Behind every successful man is a strong woman." 

Very often, the earning power of a man goes way up after he commits himself to a woman.  When you commit to GIVE, then the means to do that giving will come into your life (it's called the Law of Abundance in Magic, and just God in most Religions.  But the function of it does not depend on belief.)

Sometimes a very wealthy man (say who inherits wealth) marries a woman who is a great wealth manager.

Sometimes a wealthy woman marries a man who is a great wealth manager.

But consider the woman above -- she presents herself (perhaps coyly) as having nothing but beauty.  To whom is a woman of great beauty valuable?  To an artist, producer, or other purveyor (modeling agency owner) of beauty. 

Suppose, however, that the pretty woman has some other attribute than beauty, an attribute that will appreciate with time provided there is wealth available?

An example would be a woman who needs an expensive education to invent or discover something to change the human misery index in this world?

Say for example, this is a young woman with the Vision of how to create a cure for a disease or disorder, but she needs a doctorate and can't even get a scholarship?

Or suppose she is an entrepreneur type person who needs an investor.

In neither example is marriage the necessary component to make the business transaction work.

The fodder for a novel can be found in these situations though when you ask, "Why hasn't he found the cure for this disease, or gotten this or that education, or started up this or that business?"  Why didn't he do it himself? 

Then you ask, "Why hasn't she found a way to get the education, or team up with someone who has it?"  or "Why hasn't she just started a little garage business and demonstrated to neighbors that they should invest $100 in her business?"  (other than that this current government is making such startups impossible by making it illegal to do any of these little things without expensive permits and compliance and lawyers.)

Find answers to those "Why" questions for the high-income earner (could be either the man or the woman), then solve the entire problem by putting the two of them together into a marriage made in heaven -- where the spirits intertwine so cleanly and so naturally that each is energized, given vision, ambition, abilities they never had before BECAUSE OF the spiritual union between them supporting emotional health.

What happens when two such souls join in marriage?  Sometimes just a business partnership is needed; sometimes it needs marriage to pull off the trick -- either is 7th House.  What happens is that the spiritual energy circulating between them in that closed circuit called marriage creates the magical equivalent of the magnetic field circulating electrons create.

That magical/magnetic field can do "work" -- change things in the vicinity -- cause opportunities to arrive, trigger the actions necessary to take advantage of the opportunity, and then cascade on into a full materialization of the opportunity's potential energy. 

We discussed this magical/magnetic analogy last week.

In the Magical (Paranormal Romance) view of reality, the magic CAUSES the result.

In the God centered view of reality, the Soul reaches for contact (closes the circuit) with God, and spiritual energy flows into Reality through the person and imbues their actions with more effectiveness than when that circuit with God is open.

Either explanation will work for some readers -- but the trick the writer has to pull off is to present the vision of this process working out (a fulfilled marriage) and producing concrete results that one character explains one way, another character explains another way, and a third gives a totally different view.  None of these explanations are, (or should be) those of the author or the reader.  They are certain individual characters applying archetypical principles to the problem presented in the novel -- leaving the reader to puzzle over what really happened, knowing that the events depicted are possible in their own life.

To do that, the writer must be able to assume the point of view of each of these fully rounded characters, and for a time, to believe their explanation of why the universe works the way it does, to believe that philosophical point of view.

You have to be able to argue all kinds of points of view that are not your own.

To do that, you have to explore philosophy that is not your own.

To do that, you have to shelve your prejudices.

You see around you (just read some blog comments on the larger media sites) opinions you know in your gut are absolutely despicable -- that no honorable or reasonably value conscious human being could possibly espouse. 

You live in a world that doesn't know the difference between opinion and fact, or between opinion and a question!  But you, as a fiction writer, (most especially Romance which makes too many assumptions that aren't properly questioned in the plot), must know the difference between your own opinion, your character's opinion, facts, reality, and fiction.

To create a universe full of characters who walk off the pages into your readers' dreams, you must find for yourself a vision of this universe, how and why it functions as it does, and then how and why all these different people (your potential readers) see a totally different universe around them.  Then you have to explain to your readers the visions of the universe held by your other readers. 

This is a process that Walter Breen called "Shifting Subjectivities."  I can't think of a better name for it.

We all live in a subjective world where the self is at the "origin" (the point where the X, Y, and Z axes of our coordinate system cross), but each and every one of us is the "origin" of a totally different coordinate system.  We do have one immutable thing in common.  We all are at THE origin of A coordinate system. 

We are all unique individuals -- but we're all the same. 

That's why Hollywood is always calling for "The Same But Different." 

Create that effect among the characters of a novel and no matter how whacked out your Paranormal Romance worldbuilding has to become to tell the oddball story of Love overcoming Impossible Odds - your novel will have a powerful verisimilitude that will vibrate the subconscious minds of your readers.

By creating these individual characters living in their individual worlds, you create an opportunity for them to have Relationships.

The more stark the difference between two characters, the more powerful the attraction.

Thus the poor-but-beautiful girl can marry the rich-but-socially-awkward boy, and the two make a team that can achieve miracles.

The way to marry a rich person is to study what changes riches make in a person -- and contrast that transformed person with yourself.  Then make those changes in yourself, (My Fair Lady) even without the riches. 

Another reason "the rich" don't want to associate with "the poor" closely enough to form a Relationship is simply that so many of "the poor" don't see themselves as "rich." 

There's a Chassidic story about a Rabbi who was very poor (in money) - living in a hovel, barely able to feed wife and children - and he was known for his Wisdom and for being a very happy individual whose good cheer was infectious.  A miserable rich man came to inquire how this Rabbi could be so happy while penniless, and the poor man looked around his dirt-floored hovel and basically asked, "Poverty?  What poverty?" 

You live at 0,0,0 in your coordinate system - at the origin.  Each and every individual is in a place at the center of their universe, but only one person at a time can occupy any given place.  How one fictional character sees their life is not how the other fictional characters in the story see theirs.

How you see your life may not be how your life really is.  You can look up the Z axis -- or out the X axis -- or 90 degrees over there on the Y axis -- or 45 degrees out into the fields in between in any combination of directions -- and in each direction you will see something different, yet all these views are the truth.

You can't change your birth time, and thus your "life" (at what age certain things MIGHT happen).  But you can change how you view these events.

When you invent a character, invent their direction of view at the start of the story -- hammer them with Events -- wrench them around to look in another direction at their Life. 

Show this process in your Romance stories, show how looking in one direction all you can find are medium income potential spouses, but looking in the other direction from where you "are" you can see very rich people. 

Show how this change of direction of view can change the direction of a life's progress -- for better or for worse.

So, how do you marry a rich man?  Look at the man you've married and find where he is rich!  Look at yourself, find your riches, and give them.

That bit of advice won't help you write a MARRY A RICH MAN ROMANCE all by itself, but coupled with last week's post and the posts linked at the bottom of it,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/05/theme-element-giving-and-receiving.html
you will begin to understand Giving, Receiving and Taking at a level where you will have something important to add to the "Marry Above Your Station" Romance Genre.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Wishes and Paradoxes

Last week I watched the old Disney movie DARBY O'GILL AND THE LITTLE PEOPLE for the first time in many years. I don't think it rates as one of their top achievements, but it's a fun, lightly romantic story, and the special effects of the fairies' mound, the banshee, the pooka, and the Death Coach are cool for its time. A young Sean Connery plays Darby's daughter's love interest—singing, yet! Random thought: Nowadays a film intended for children probably wouldn't be allowed to include the scene where Darby tricks the king of the leprechauns by getting him drunk on illegal whiskey (poteen). More focused thought: I think I noticed a major plot glitch on this viewing, from the perspective of a fan of SF and fantasy. At the climax Darby's daughter gets lured away by a pooka, gets badly injured in a fall, and lies at the point of death. Darbv uses the last of the three wishes due to him from the king of the little people to take his daughter's place in the Death Coach. It has been established that if a mortal makes more wishes after the classic three, the previous three wishes are negated. So the king, riding along in the Death Coach, tricks Darby into making a fourth wish, thereby wiping out the granting of the wish that doomed Darby to death. (His first two wishes aren't affected because they were fulfilled by events that have already happened and don't involve any tangible objects he could lose.) So far, so good. The Death Coach vanishes, leaving the old man by the side of the road unharmed. Meanwhile, back home, his daughter has already awakened, cured. But—when the boon he gained from the third wish was deleted, not only should he have been saved, his daughter's cure should have been reversed. Shouldn't it? Either the wish takes effect and Darby lives while his daughter dies, or the wish is annulled and she dies while he lives. I don't see any way around it. The script cleverly sets up the solution to their plight with the "fourth wish" rule, and it works fine for a viewer who's willing to overlook the plot hole in the interests of a happy ending. In fact, considering I don't think I even noticed it until this time around, lots of people probably wouldn't see a problem. Most kids probably wouldn't. (Similar logical lapses, incidentally, show up in some time travel romances where the author struggles to get around a situation she has set up that would make it impossible for the characters to stay together.) The trouble with following the wish paradox to its rigorous conclusion is that such an outcome would change the movie from a comedy to a tragedy. I wonder whether there would have been any logical way around the dilemma? Margaret L. Carter Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Theme Element Giving And Receiving

Below is a list of previous posts circling around the edges of this topic.  This is an index post that will be referred to later. 

You may have often wondered why I go on and on and ON about abstract, philosophical, boring and almost meaningless subjects.

The answer is simple: those boring subjects are the essence of theme, and theme is the raw stuff of the artist's craft, whether in images or words.  Factor theme into opposing views and you have CONFLICT which is the essence of story and plot. 

Art is all about Life and the meaning of life -- where it came from, where it's going, why bother? 

I got a note from a long-time reader of my Sime~Gen novels who discovered the first published novel in that universe, House of Zeor, and described how just reading that novel had straightened out many emotional issues for her. 

She gave the novel to the therapist she was seeing at the time, struggling to get her head straight about emotional traumas in her extreme youth (her grandmother had died in her arms, and it seemed to her that her mother had blamed her for the grandmother's death -- the truth of that may never be known, but I'm talking major emotional trauma here!).  She read House of Zeor, got a grip on the edges of her issues, gave the novel to her therapist so the therapist could share a "language" of symbolism and vocabulary with her in order to discuss how she felt about her issues. 


You can find the novels in paper, e-book and some in audiobook here:

http://astore.amazon.com/simegen-20   find them there, and grab the ISBN and you can find them all over.

We all know that bringing an amorphous lump of emotional tangle UP to the verbal level and the act of SHARING that verbalization with others can change just about everything in life -- because it changes you.

It is a transaction, in the lingo of "transactional analysis" -- a whole field about interchanges among people.

Dialogue -- as we've discussed at some depth in this blog -- is about giving and receiving.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/03/dialogue-part-3-romance-erotica-vs-porn.html -- has links to the prior parts on dialogue.

Fiction is about the selective recreation of reality -- the writer looks out their eyes, sees "the world" and selects just certain lines (like Japanese Brush Painting) to "suggest" reality but not fill in all the details.  The details the reader fills in makes the novel unique for each reader. 

So there is a "transaction" (a dialogue) between the writer and the reader -- an act of giving from the writer to the reader (nevermind the cumbersome mechanism of Publishing that gets in between -- that's shrinking these days.)

It is a rare and treasured privilege for a writer to receive from a reader -- to read a story the reader wrote to express the impact of the original story on the reader, or just a thank-you note, or a whole essay on the effect a book has had on a real living person's life choices. 

How does a writer select what brushstrokes of philosophy to put into a work -- and what to leave out?  I mean other than considerations of marketing?

In order to select, one must have a replete inventory to select from.  That means a collection of odd bits and pieces -- mostly the kind of trivia that writer-type folks tend to become fascinated with, to pursue, and to collect.

In fact, the signature feature of a "writer" at the age of 5 or 10 is just that kind of curiosity and attention that leads them to investigate this and that, here and there, thither and yon until they drive their parents totally around the bend.

And the most annoying thing about young writers-to-be is the incessant asking of questions, the worst being, "Why?" 

The answer to "Why?" is always, ever, and perpetually PHILOSOPHY. 

Within the envelope subject of philosophy you find all the Religions, all the forms of Spirituality, and every speculation on the origin, structure and process of "The World" and "Life."  You find cosmology, cosmogony, and epistemology inside Philosophy.

Philosophy is the bedrock study of the proto-writer. 

All the answers are in there, but there's no way to tell which answer is THE answer. 

So a writer setting out to do a job of worldbuilding so they can tell stories in that world has to slice out a subset of issues, and choose AN answer, knowing it's not their own answer (and shouldn't be).

Selecting that one sub-set of material from all they know, the writer then draws a picture of "the world" -- and sets characters loose to explore it and find answers the character can use to craft the character's life.

When I started out writing, I surveyed the world around me and found a subject that was a source of a major issue in many people's lives.  And I built the entire "world" of Sime~Gen around that issue.

The issue is what I call COMPASSION -- and the root of it is the extremely esoteric process of GIVING and RECEIVING.

I have subsequently spent many years studying the various theories and philosophies surrounding this "transaction" -- the root of dialogue is giving and receiving, or a transaction, a bargain, a deal.

You can start with the Creator of the Universe calling to Avram and saying "Come walk in my ways and I'll make of you a Great Nation."  And Avram picking up (in his eighties!  A city boy, a shopkeeper who sold idols for a living) and taking off into the wilderness before even asking, "What ways?" 

That was a "deal" a "transaction" and it transformed not only Avram into Avraham but all generations to come until this day, and perhaps beyond.  It shaped human history.

And it was about GIVING and RECEIVING.  The Creator of the Universe GAVE and Avram RECEIVED.  Avram did not take. 

In our world, today, we still haven't mastered the difference between GIVING and TAKING and why that distinction is important.  We have constructed the United States (and many other countries - maybe the whole of our civilization) on the idea that a government can TAKE taxes from people and then GIVE that wealth to others, and that constitutes the act of CHARITY, and satisfies the requirement for HUMAN COMPASSION.

Taking, it turns out in the farthest reaches of the abstraction called philosophy, is not a process that allows one to Receive what was taken! 

The "magic" works like electronic circuitry where moving electrons generate a magnetic field that can do work (physics definition of "work"):

---- in Giving/Receiving you have a closed circuit, and current flows, creating that magnetic field surrounding the movement of electrons that can CAUSE things to happen in the vicinity.

--- in Taking/Giving you have an open circuit, and current does not flow, and there is no magnetic field generated that can CAUSE anything to happen. 


In the Magical View of the Universe it works the same way only instead of electrons you have the spiritual energy we experience as Will and Emotion (Wands and Cups in Tarot).  Actions (Swords) are fueled by Emotions (Cups), and the RESULT of an action makes that emotion concrete in our world.  How does that work?  The action itself (which can be a spoken word or a sword chop) generates a "field" around it just as a moving electron generates a magnetic field -- as magnetic fields interact with other physical objects in the vicinity (such as another copper wire), so magical actions interact with other spiritual objects in the vicinity (Souls -- as in Soul Mates). 

So we've constructed a civilization pouring energy into a closed circuit, striving to eliminate poverty and failing abysmally.

An artist can look at our civilization from outside and see it burning itself up because of all that energy going into a closed circuit generating a lot of heat but no spiritual or magical equivalent of a magnetic field to do the work of eliminating poverty.  In fact, we just make poverty worse, trapping people in a system where they can't save, invest, inherit substantial wealth and invest it rather than spending it -- walled around with rules that prevent climbing out of the trap of poverty. 

Maybe that "vision" of how things work is not true, but as far as fictional worldbuilding is concerned it is a usable thesis.

If the misery in this world is due to our substituting TAKING (taxes) for GIVING (charity) in an attempt to RECEIVE (wealth) -- how do we fix that?

Sime~Gen discusses that problem by setting up a graphic (visual) situation, a conflict which drives the plots, to which you and I have no answer or resolution. 

But as one reader of House of Zeor discovered, by sharing the symbolism in which that problem is isolated from the rest of our pea-soup confusion of a reality, and by entering into a giving and receiving transaction with a therapist, she was able to break out of the emotional paralysis and create a new life with some satisfying relationships and creative products. 

That's what fiction reading can do that nothing else can do. 

Fiction works this way because it's an over-simplified model of reality, just like a "model" that physicists work from is over-simplified.  The simplification reveals details not otherwise available.  Physicists work with electrons and tensile strengths.  Writers work with emotions and relationships. 

To pull off a worldbuilding trick like this -- one that delivers a payload to readers that "escapist" literature can't and doesn't -- a writer must have thought deeply on these subjects, more deeply than the reader has yet, and place that thought at the depths of the worldbuilding, and not on the surface of the story.

This is what is meant in screenwriting jargon by keeping your dialogue "off the nose"  -- don't write "on the nose" means don't SAY IT EXPLICITLY.  It means show don't tell.  It means put the issue's discussion in images, in symbols, in room decoration and the shape of the clouds in the sky, in the personality of the horse the hero rides, in the shape of a belt-buckle, in the Armani Suits the heroes all wear! 

Encode these deep thoughts in code.  The code writers use is symbolism, and that comes from the archetypes at the core of our subconscious minds.

Learn those archetypes by studying all the religions and philosophies you can.  Place no limits on what you will explore.  Just don't believe any of it.  Amongst the litter, you may actually find something you can use in real life, but that's not the purpose of the exploration. 

The purpose of the writer's adventure into philosophy is to find out what other people are using in their real lives, in order to speak their language (of symbols) and thus convey (give) a vision to them, convey a selective recreation of reality in such a way that their surrounding reality becomes clearer.

Here are some of my previous posts on Giving and Receiving, a grab-bag of thoughts and writing processes on adventures into this really abstract corner of philosophy that is the essence of Romance, but most especially of the Paranormal Romance story.  Like most adventures, it has its boring spots, its terrifying spots, and its satisfying revelations.  Read it all in these posts:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2007/11/6-pentacles-social-contract.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/gift-giver-recipient.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/11/linguistics-for-writers.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/tree-in-forest.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/vampire-archetype-flashburned-into.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/01/competing-for-mate.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/genetic-mechanism-by-which-love.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Sunday, May 13, 2012

How EBay Handles Copyright Infringement


Imagine that you are an author and some totally irresponsible, opportunistic dunderhead has been selling all your in-copyright e-books in a collection of... lets say, 199,000 e-books for Kindle. He has also published statements on his listing that your ebooks are in the public domain and free to sell or share.

He has sold hundreds of these DVDs over the years. Then, someone catches him.

Here's how honest EBay protects your rights as an infringed author. This is the message they send to anyone who may not yet have received the DVDs containing your works.

Dear ...... (buyer's name)

We'd like to let you know that eBay has ended an item you were bidding on for breaching of one or more of our policies. As it's important that eBay maintains member privacy, we can't tell you exactly why the listing was removed.

Any offers or bids placed on this eBay Stores listing are now null and void. If you were the winning bidder, you're no longer obliged to pay for the item:

XXXXXXXXXX - XXX,000 books eBook DVD CD AMAZON KINDLE IPAD IPHONE TABLET SONY SAMSUNG ANDROID

Here's what you can do if you've already paid for the item:

If you won the item and you've already paid for it, you can choose to reverse the payment or ask the seller for a refund. If you've already received the item you've the option of accepting it or returning it to the seller for a refund.

1) Contact the seller
2) Contact your payment provider
3) Report that the matter hasn't been resolved

- Contact the seller

At this stage, we recommend that you contact the seller and discuss the situation. These situations can often be resolved with a friendly conversation.

Check your email account for any previous emails you received from the seller - these may contain their contact information. Unfortunately, we can't give you the seller's contact details.

- Contact your payment provider

If you can't reach the seller, contact the service that you used to send payment. They may be able to reverse the payment.

If you used PayPal, copy this link into a new browser window to find out whether your purchase is protected:

https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_pbp-info-outside#dispute

If you paid by another method, such as bank transfer or credit card, contact your bank or credit card company.

- Report that the matter hasn't been resolved

If you're not able to arrange a refund and you didn't receive the item (or it wasn't as described in the listing), please let us know. You can contact us from any eBay Help page.

We assure you that your eBay record won't be negatively affected by this matter. We've told the seller that this listing has been removed and that you're no longer obliged to complete the purchase.

Finally, as the listing has been removed, no Feedback can be left for the purchase.

We hope that this information helps you decide how to proceed in this situation. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

eBay Trust & Safety


Now.... how exactly does that warn booklovers who have bought all those illegal copies of in-copyright ebooks that they may not resell or share what they just bought?

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Death of Genre?

Charles Stross on the death of genre: The Death of Genre He begins with some thoughts about science fiction in blockbuster movies, the ongoing “conversation” among SF authors in print, and the marketing purpose of book cover illustrations. (They’re meant to grab casual readers; existing fans don’t need them.) His main point, however, is the effect of the shift of most book sales from physical bookstores to websites: Works of fiction no longer have to be tied down to a single generic category. Unlike in a physical shop with limited shelf space, in an online store a book can be classified under as many genres as it fits or in even narrower divisions shaped by an individual reader’s interests and the subtlety of the search engine. Ideally, a customer could ask for something like “vampire romances set in the seventeenth century with French characters” and get a list of relevant novels. It’s obvious that online sales, once perfected (we’re not there yet), will transfigure genre as a marketing model. But does that prospective change mean genre as a classification system for writers and readers will “die”? Is the fiction market actually destined to revert to the status quo of the nineteenth century, when popular magazines published many different types of stories within the same issues, and highly respected authors wrote both “realistic” and fantastic material with no damage to their reputations—only with the addition of fine-tuned search tools? Stross also points out a disadvantage, to the customer, of this brave new world: “We are in the position, as readers, of being stranded in an infinitely large bookstore.” How do we discern which among these millions of works are worth reading? Unless we stick only to authors we already know, which most of us wouldn't want to do. Do read Stross’s article. Do you think his predictions are valid? Margaret L. Carter Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Talent: Mystique Or Mistake



I saw a comment on Twitter about writing TALENT that I just have to discuss here because Talent is such a big issue when you're contemplating "becoming" a writer. 
----
Before we start on that, I have to point out that this week the Vampire anthology I edited (but did not contribute a story to) is just now available on Amazon etc, and it contains stories by 9 authors who would all be labeled "Talented" by most observers.  I didn't select these stories because the writers are "Talented," and I doubt any editor would choose stories for an anthology on that basis.  



----

So this comment I found on Twitter could be paraphrased: "I hope someday someone will recognize my Talent as a writer."

The comment made me very sad, but it reminded me we hadn't discussed Talent here at all.  In fact, I'm not sure I've used that word in these writing discussions.

That's because I don't "believe in" Talent as necessary to being a professional artist, actor, writer, wordsmith, dreamspinner, whatever you call what we do in writing Romance stories.  

I don't believe a lack of Talent is a barrier to achieving anything, in the Arts, Sciences, or anywhere.  In fact, you'll do better without Talent than with it.

When I was in 4th grade or so, there was an English assignment to write a "Tall Story" after we'd studied Paul Bunyan and related stories. 

I immediately grasped the concept of the Tall Story.  It seemed way beyond the conceptual ability of the rest of the class (in my school, a class was about 50 students and 1 teacher, which I consider an ideal ratio probably because I got used to it young.)

Now this was long before I became steeped in Science Fiction, and may have been the reason my mother introduced me to Science Fiction when I was in 5th grade, but she never said so.  I basically invented the entire field of science fiction, whole cloth out of nothing except kid-lit about talking animals etc.  I'd never heard of science fiction at that time, and Adult Fantasy didn't exist as a field.  So I made it up for a Tall Story. 

I don't remember much about that first story I ever wrote.  This is pretty much before I actually learned to READ which was in 5th grade after my mother brought me SF novels from the adult library when I was home sick.  I do remember I wrote about a guy who lived all alone in a cabin on the side of a craggy, rocky mountain overlooking a huge gorge (I can still see the image in my mind.)  I lived at that time in a totally flat town with a couple of small hills in the distance.  I'd never seen any place that looked like the setting for this story.  I don't remember the character I invented or what he did except it was "impossible" and involved affecting something on the other side of the gorge.  Yes, it was about a guy not a gal.  I had no idea of plot or story structure.  The assignment was to think of a Tall Story - something impossible that nobody else could imagine could be true. 

That's exactly what I did.  And everyone was astonished (except the rest of the class of course; they were just confused).  My teacher and my parents said I was Talented.  I didn't have a clue what "Talent" meant but it seemed to me it pleased them, which was a rare experience for me so it made an impression.

I was in 10th grade before I actually committed myself to a lifetime career as a writer of science fiction, do or die trying. 

Even by then, I had no clue what Talent was but I had ascertained by experiment and experience that I had NONE other than the ability to imagine the inconceivable as if it were commonplace reality.  I just didn't live in the same "world" other people around me lived in, but most people wouldn't call that a Talent.  More like a handicap?  

Long after I finished college, I did discover what Talent is and that I do have some, just not for art or writing stories or anything I really wanted to do. 

In between, I was increasingly puzzled by what people mean by the word Talent, and more and more determined to find out what Talent is, where it comes from, why it exists, and whether or why it matters at all.

The prevailing culture we live in is as obsessed with Talent as I am with the meaning of Words.  I love words.  I love how they feel in my mouth, especially words in a foreign language.  I love languages, especially those that are not cognate with English, my native language. 

I love gnawing at the puzzle of how the mind works, how humans use symbols like words, how ideas are generated and communicated with words, binding generations together so that we truly do "stand on the shoulders of giants." 

I love ideas, and how they interweave and turn around each other, forming dimensional pictures in the mind.  I love the research involved in relating the mind and the brain.  I love this world and the people who live in it, bewildered and happy at the same time.  Falling in love is what life is all about.  The things you do when in a mental/emotional state of that kind of love/joy/happiness/delight succeed no matter the barriers that seem to be in the way, no matter the lack of Talent or Skill.  Love does indeed conquer All. 

So, after my mother introduced me to science fiction, and I found science fiction fandom (or rather it found me: I wrote a letter to an SF Magazine that was published with my address and my mailbox exploded with letters from fellow-fans) I set out to launch myself into a profession as a writer, and knew I needed a strategy.

At that time, I didn't know that Love Conquers All, I just knew that nothing on earth was going to stop me no matter what. 

So I started my research by reading a lot of biographies of writers, famous and otherwise, (and autobiographies, too), which led to reading a lot of history and non-fiction travel books (I read everything on parapsychology and UFOs in the library even though I had to sneak into the stacks and sit there to do it being too young to borrow those adult books).  My attitudes towards words and language, and a host of other subjects like drama and philosophy, all painted a picture of a writer.  I learned that I had everything needed for a career in writing except Talent (but who cares, I will not be stopped!)  One thing all successful writers had in common was Travel -- and I hadn't done much of that. 

Talent, I thought, was something I'd have to do without, but Travel -- that lack I could remedy.

I loved to travel.  My Dad took us on a vacation every year to interesting places, and I loved riding in the car staring out the window, stopping and meeting people who lived in different places.  Eventually I learned to love driving the Interstates.  By the time I got out of college, I was able to drive across country (coast to coast) and stop and drive around towns without a map (pre-GPS), though years later I had to rely on maps because they kept building roads.  With a map, I could go anywhere.

But I'd never been farther out of this country than across the Mexican border to a border town (places you wouldn't go wander around in by yourself today).  So when I got out of college, I got a job in Israel and lived there for a couple of years -- language, travel, adventure became my middle name. 

I had determined that I was a science fiction writer -- though I hadn't written anything except a couple of novels when I was in college, and some worldbuilding exercises when I was in 7th-10th grade. 

I invented worlds and  characters incessantly (another signature habit of the pre-writer).  I wrote a lot of long-long (20 page) letters to pen pals in foreign countries.  I wrote a lot of letters to other science fiction fans, and articles for fanzines (on paper), and that letter-to-the-editor that was my first print publication.  I chained a lot of words together, but never actually did any of the things I've been discussing in these blog posts as the essence of the writing craft until after I was married and raising kids.

I realize now that I was educating myself in the craft by churning out millions of words.  When I had decided to commit my life to the profession of writing, my Aunt gave me a subscription to Writer Magazine, and I went to the library and borrowed (systematically) all the previous issues they had in archive (kids weren't supposed to be able to do that - I had to get my Mom's permission.) 

I came to understand that I have no talent for writing at all.  But I also learned you don't need talent to do a better job at anything than those who have talent.  In fact, having no talent for something is a prime credential for doing that thing at the world-class level. 

I learned that TALENT is the word we use to refer to something that's born into a person.  If you have a talent for something then when you first encounter it, you can do it easily, almost without effort, and with very little actual instruction, and ridiculously few failures.  

You've read biographies of child prodigies who can play Mozart by age 8, or whiz through college math courses before they're 12.  That's talent.

It's like your computer that comes with programs pre-installed.  When you boot it up the first time, you click a few things, type in your name and whatever, and presto the program is running.  You didn't have to shop for it, put a disk in the drive, coax it to load the install program, fight with it.  It just works.

That's talent -- a set of skills pre-installed.  One encounter and presto, the skills are booted and ready to use. 

Some kids can play tennis after being shown how to hold a racket.  Some can learn Ballet at professional levels after some basic exercises to stretch and strengthen muscles, and then being shown how to move to a rhythm.  Something inside goes CLICK and then they can do it, and do it perfectly. 

Some are like that with a violin, and after going through 3 local teachers, they get sent to Juliard at age 14 and pushed to Carnegie Hall.

Not me! 

Not only did I come with no pre-installed writing/storycraft skills, but the talents I do have are irrelevant to learning those skills.

Here's what I learned about Talent that makes the whole thing clear.

Study of Astrology reveals sets of aspects in a natal chart that manifest as what most people call or recognize as Talent. 

Here's the list of Astrology Just for Writers posts I've done on this blog which may mention Talent.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html  (parts 1-9)

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/08/astrology-just-for-writers-part-10.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-11.html

The theory of reincarnation when combined with Astrology indicates that these Talents you see in natal charts are the skills and abilities acquired in prior lives, or maybe bestowed before you're born. 

Well, what I learned is that THIS LIFE I'm living now is the "prior" life for my next life, (if I have one.)

What skills and abilities I acquire in this life will appear in my natal chart next time as Talent.  (Or maybe not, we'll see.) 

So if I work to acquire skills now, I may have them later when I need them.  Or maybe, like now, doing those things won't seem interesting to me, and I'll be off acquiring new Talents. 

I learned that this concept of what Talent is and where it comes from implies something even more profound.  You don't need TALENT!!! It's excess baggage.  And life is better if nobody knows you have it.

In Astrology, the 10th House Cusp is your vocation, your sacred calling, what you were born to do.  That mathematical point in the sky when you were born may not be involved in any of the Talent aspects in your chart, and thus you don't have a Talent for what you were born to do, but it's still your mission in life to do it.  Talents may be missions accomplished in prior lives, but not what this life is about -- or what this life is to prepare you for next time. 

You don't have to be talented to accomplish things.  In fact, the most successful people aren't talented at what they are successful at.  (Madonna comes to mind.)  Those who are talented at something (golf, acting, surfboarding, football) have enormous success very early in life (because what they're doing is altogether too easy for them), skyrocket to the top of their profession, then crash and burn in mid-life, rarely living to old age and seeing great-grandchildren through college.  (Michael Jackson comes to mind.) 

Others, like say George Burns for example, doggedly gain skills and advance in their profession, adding dimensions as they go along, and live to a hundred before they star in the definitive movie of a lifetime (he played God in "Oh, God!"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076489/combined


He and Gracie Allen had a long, massively successful career always adding skills as they went from medium to medium.  Here's another photo from Wikipedia
ttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/ee/Burns&Allen1938.jpg/220px-Burns&Allen1938.jpg

Sunday, May 06, 2012

Open Letter To John Read



As many of my colleagues may be aware, there is a period of public comment on whether or not Federal Settlements of the anti-trust action against the Big 6 and Apple are in the public interest.

No doubt, there will be a great many self-serving letters sent in by readers who would like to claim a small refund on e-books they purchased on the Apple platform.

I think that any Settlement money could be much better, more fairly, and more wisely spent.

To
John Read
Chief Litigation III Section
Antitrust Division
US Department of Justice
450 5th Street, NW
Suite 4000
Washington DC 20530

Dear John Read, Your Honor,

I write to offer a comment on the possible settlement of litigation against various publishers and Apple for their alleged wrong-doing in offering an alternative to Amazon's predatory discounting of e-books.

My opinion is that purchasers should not receive a windfall "restitution" for e-book purchases they made willingly and voluntarily. The customers were not deceived. They were not obliged to purchase e-books at the advertised price if that price was more than they were prepared to pay.

Restitution would send a disastrous message to the public and to authors. Moreover, it would be very costly to administer, and the individual payouts would be small.

Please consider instead, suggesting that the Settlement moneys should be used to fund public education about copyright and copyright infringement, and/or action against copyright infringers of e-books.

This would be fair to the majority of members of the public who are honest and pay for their e-books, it would be fair to authors and publishers, and if piracy could be reduced, the cost of e-books ought to come down. Everyone would win.

That said, as an author, I am not at all in favor of this action by the DOJ, and I am extremely concerned that any owners of intellectual property may in future be accused of conspiracy if they discuss among themselves the "right" and "fair" price at which they are prepared to sell their books, or the pros and cons of Amazon contracts.

I deplore the implication that Amazon should be allowed to dictate the price range of e-books to authors and publishers regardless of other fixed costs that publishers and authors have to cover through legal sales, regardless of the length or the book, or the amount of time and effort that went into the content.

Yours sincerely,

Rowena Cherry.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Tricking Readers

Here’s an entertaining article on “Three Ways People Are Tricked into Reading Science Fiction”: Three Ways People Are Tricked Is this kind of “trickery” usually a good thing or not? Would most readers agree with the article’s author that they’ve enjoyed a novel or film they wouldn’t normally have tried, or would they feel angry about the “bait and switch”? Personally, I’ve more often reacted with annoyance to the opposite situation, a book whose title, cover, and blurb give absolutely no indication that it contains content I wouldn’t want to miss (say, a unique approach to vampires), a book that I would have passed up without notice if not for an informative review. I have run into some books where I’ve felt irritated at being “tricked,” however. MUST LOVE DOGS particularly sticks in my mind. I knew this novel was “chick lit” but expected from the title, blurb, and cover illustration that the story would include significant content related to, you know, DOGS. If the blurb places stress on the heroine’s personal-ad fib that she’s in search of a dog-loving man, I expect plot complications revolving around her having to fake canine expertise and thereby getting reluctantly drawn into the world of dog breeding, training, etc. Not to have the whole canine motif simply dropped after a few throwaway references. Bait and switch. I sometimes pick up a paranormal romance with a cartoon cover that makes me expect something light and fun, only to find that the cover contradicts the book’s darker tone. To me, that’s poor marketing. The TV series BEING HUMAN had a similar effect on me. From the premise, a ghost, werewolf, and vampire sharing an apartment, I expected a light, fun approach to the theme of “passing for human.” Instead, the program is not only serious but dark, although with moments of black humor. In this case I can’t really blame the show or the network for my disappointed expectations, though; my own preconceptions probably led me astray. In all these cases, however, the book or film was still in the overall genre I expected. I can’t remember ever having read or viewed a work that turned out to be a totally different genre from what the cover or blurb suggested. I can imagine situations where a hardcore science fiction reader might pick up a book that looks like SF but turns out to be, by his standards, fantasy and feeling outraged at the “deception.” A dedicated fantasy fan might react similarly to a story with the tropes of fantasy but a scientific explanation in the background. My husband and I took a risk with our “Wild Sorceress” trilogy (Amber Quill Press). The story reads like fantasy and is marketed as such, but an SF background is gradually revealed in the third book. Have you come across works of fiction or film that overturned your genre expectations, and did you feel cheated or pleasantly surprised? Margaret L. Carter Carter's Crypt

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

The Wrong Way To Write A Story

I've said here any number of times there's no "right" or "wrong" way to write, or tell a story, and no "wrong" story to tell.  I've illustrated that with exploring several interesting novels.  Examples:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2011/04/gene-doucettes-immortal-revisited.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/02/research-plot-integration-in-historical.html
But all across the web I'm finding people explaining what they don't want to do with their writing, and for what reasons -- and I'm finding professionals with money to invest in producing or publishing who are explaining what they need from writers and it is what the writers want to avoid doing.

And ne'er the twain shall meet, it seems.

So here's one more attempt to explain to each of these groups what the other is talking about and why.

I've been messing around with graphics software, Adobe professional level stuff that reminds me of Macromedia (Adobe bought Macromedia a while back).  I've never mastered any of these programs as I have Word Processors gallore.  Graphics programs are tools for doing something my mind does not do, while word processors are tools for showing you what my mind does!

However, in messing around with graphics I've found something you don't see right off in word processors that could illuminate this communications problem between writers and producer/publisher folks.

It's LAYERS.  Today's computer graphics (such as Photoshop) are in "layers."  Layers give you the power to animate things.  It's quite a neat trick, and you don't need to buy the software to find out how it's done.  I've put the link in below. 

Your "ART" goes in the "background" layer, that's your worldbuilding, the philosophy, the iconic dimension of your imagery. 

The "CRAFT" goes in the "foreground" layer, and there are multitudinous layers in between until you get to the "mid-ground" where Art and Craft blend into solid commercial art.

People running a business founded on delivering your artistic product to a market large enough to make back their investment plus a profit for you and them are looking for is CRAFT.

They don't know, and don't want to know (and between you and me shouldn't know) anything at all about your ART -- your writer's art to be art must be invisible to the naked eye of the businessman/woman.

The editor/businessperson/investor is only interested in your CRAFT, your ability to pour your (Neptune-ruled) formless ART into the pre-constructed (Saturn-ruled) mold.

That's what programs like Photoshop do -- they set up a very limited FORM into which various half-baked products (a picture you just snapped) can be poured and then "set" or chilled (rendered) into something sharper, brighter, or morphed into a suggestion of something other than the original.

Film and TV professionals use programs that are far more sophisticated, less limited, having larger but more precise tools (and requiring a lot more computer power) to create things like the film Avatar or the Harry Potter films.

But you don't need the software to seat the major concept in your mind.  Look at this tutorial video - or look up some other tutorial videos on animation on YouTube.

http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/Adobe-Flash-Tutorial-Basic-animation/73931

Now here's what's going on with the conversation between writers and publishers.

Writers are talking about creating one LAYER of the finished product, while Publishers/Producers are talking about another LAYER which goes on top of the artistic layer.

The writers or art-originator is creating ART.

Astrologically ART is ruled by Neptune, and is nebulous, fuzzy, without edges, all about philosophy and vision into the higher levels of reality, beyond the mere physical.  Neptune is Romance, Soul-Mates, about "making love" and all the processes that enliven the Soul and connect you to the ineffable.

Astrologically Publishing/Producing and all sorts of businesses are ruled by Saturn, structure/discipline/application.  Saturn is all about the concrete world, and the practical results obtained within concrete reality.  Saturn is about Making a Living, about marriage as a business arrangement, about the physical body, and about "having sex" and the processes of procreation. 

These are two separate "layers" of our existence, and if you stretch the analogy of how Art software works to create these marvelous animations, to create the vivid colors, and to alter the appearance of reality (just consider some of the Superbowl commercials), you can visualize each of the "Planets" of the zodiac in your natal chart as LAYERS OF YOU, layers of reality overlying each other and interpenetrating to produce what you laughingly call your life.

So while your editor is earnestly explaining the realities of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and plot-structure, character continuity and arc in terms of marketability and profit margin, audience "reach" and so forth, you are yelling back that "There Is No Wrong Story!"  There can't be such a thing as an "error" in writing -- this is my story! 

You're talking about two separate "Layers" and you haven't run the function called "rendering" yet.

A writer who is trying to market their own material needs a cut-down tool like Photoshop (and its accompanying suite if you need to do animations), a tool you can use without completely mastering the entire suite of tools.

Fooling around with tools like this can give you not only the concept of LAYERS but also sharpen your ability to create those visual "icons" that bring the background worldbuilding and philosophy into the foreground of the craft layer, welding them together (rendering) inextricably so that no among of editing can destroy what is precious to you about your story.

There is no "wrong" in Art.  There are many "wrongs" in Craft.     

Producers and publishers usually don't look for new talent unless they're desperate in a failing market.  Think twice about being "found" and dragged into a failing market -- do it if you have a strategy for spring-boarding yourself out of that avalanche of downward pressure.

Here are the statistics for 2011 from Publisher's Weekly

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/50805-aap-estimates-e-book-sales-rose-117-in-2011-as-print-fell.html

--------------QUOTE-----------
Despite slowing growth rates in the final quarter of 2011, e-book sales rose 117% for the year, generating revenue of $969.9 million at the companies that report sales to the Association of American Publishers. Sales in all trade print segments fell in the year, however, with the mass market paperback segment showing the largest decline with sales from reporting houses down almost 36%, to $431.5 million. Adult hardcover and trade paperback sales were off 17.5% and 15.6%, respectively. In children’s, the YA/hardcover segment sales fell 4.7% and paperback sales fell 12.7%.

 The religion segment had a solid year, with sales up 8.4% in all formats. And in audio, physical audio sales fell 8.1% at reporting companies, while downloadable audio rose 25.5% for the year.
-----------END QUOTE---------

Also remember "the medium is the message" -- writing for one delivery system is not the same as writing for another.  Study your delivery systems, business models, and let the data soak into your subconscious where it will be melded with your Art. 

Producers and Publishers will generally go back to the Names who have presented them with usable material on a regular and hassle-free basis.

They all want someone they can ask, "Give me something in this genre," and get "I'll have it for you in three weeks."  And when they get the manuscript, they want to be able to finger Paragraph 3, page 100, and email back "there's an error right there" -- get the answer, "Oooops, sorry. I'll have a clean manuscript to you tomorrow morning."  And when the morning comes, the rewrite is in the inbox -- and it does indeed correct the error.

Without even explaining what exactly the problem is, the investor gets it fixed because the craftsman is a craftsman. 

What did the craftsman do to fix the error that the investor couldn't do?  The craftsman went back to the file in her head that has all the layers separate - the file that has the "image" unrendered, un-flattened, with all the pieces distinctly separate.  And the craftsman then brought up one of the layers which was causing the problem, tweaked it a bit in a way that did not even TOUCH the underlying Artistic Vision, then re-rendered the Image, saved it, attached the file and emailed it back. 

It's that simple for a writer to fix a problem an editor or publisher has with a story -- if the writer has created the thing in layers to begin with, saved the layer-rich file, rendered a copy that's flattened and submitted that.

Most beginning writers "have an idea" -- and it comes to their conscious mind already rendered so it can't be easily edited one layer at a time.  So when a potential investor says "this is wrong" the beginner "feels" (not thinks, feels) the art is attacked at a visceral level because the "art" and "craft" are "flattened" into one layer at the Idea level.  But all that's being perceived by the potential investor is the grainy, blurry feel to the edges of the objects in the rendering, the craft not the art. 

One is discussing the sharpness of the image and the other is discussing what the image is of.  Neither can win the argument because it's not an argument yet.  To argue and thus resolve a problem, you must both be talking about the same thing.

To fix that tendency to produce "an idea" without layers (a Polaroid print not a digital image), the new writer has to master the "Photoshop" in her artistic mind, separate the layers of "My Idea," use the mending tool to snip out "noise" and sharpen the edges, and re-render it as a marketable product. 

The graphic artist always keeps a copy of the project (several copies in various stages actually) in the original file format that keeps the "layers" and all the rest of the effects separate.  The rendered end-product is delivered to the investor. 

The rendered product is something the artist has no emotional investment in (just a financial investment).  That's the secret to dealing with editors, publishers and producers.

Read this item on why and how lovingly written screenplays get morphed into something unrecognizable by the production process.

http://www.quora.com/Why-do-studios-rewrite-scripts-after-buying-them/answer/Sean-Hood
Think of every story you write (especially something shorter than a novel) as a potential screenplay which will (not might, will) undergo this process.  Put your Art down inside the background layer where it won't be touched.

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Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com