Where Are the Older Heroines?

Where are the older heroines in romance novels?

Not there. Not often. Not that I've seen.

And by older I only mean, like, getting close to forty. It seems to be okay for romance heroes to be forty or above - though I've noticed the author may let you know only once or twice and then not mention it again - but heroines? Not so much. Fifty and above? Even close to fifty? Where are they? Are they there, only hidden away in specialty imprints?

I wonder if this will change, now that the world's population is aging? Or if there's some ingrained marketing belief that post-fifty people are assumed to want to read about people younger than themselves, much as kids are assumed to want to read about kids who are a little older than themselves?

My favorite romance with a post-fifty heroine is Stitch in Snow by Anne McCaffrey.

And as a side note, I'd love to read a romance novel with a heroine for whom age is a feature, not a bug. Who's perhaps happy she's grown in wisdom and self-knowledge, because it gives her more resources to fight the vampires.

What do you think?

If you have examples of romance novels with heroines past forty, please share them! I think at this point I'd even take past thirty-five.

Underclothes in World War One

Cunningham, C. Willett and Phillis. The History of Underclothes. London: Faber & Faber Ltd., revised ed. 1981.

p. 141 by the end of WWI, women's lingerie was called "undies."

p. 142 for men: united garments cover to the wrists and the ankles. Pants reach to ankle, drawers to knees. Vests are undershirts, with either long or short sleeves. Nightshirts were long. Pajamas were made of flannel or silk.

P 143 women's underwear was mostly made by hand. Often decorated with embroidery, threaded ribbon.

p. 144 corsets: "by the end of the [war] it started only a couple of inches above the waist and stretched well down over the thighs." "At the same time the waist became less constricted and boning much lighter."

p. 146 petticoats: by 1918 long with straight-hanging flounce (just above ankle), made of white cambric. The word brassiere first appeared in U.S. Vogue in 1907. (bra came into use much later.) Camisoles were still in use.

p. 147 knickers or drawers: "French" knickers were wide with frilly legs. "Directoire" knickers, or culottes, fastened with elastic or bands at knee and waist, fit more closely, and had removable cotton linings.

"Combinations were of longcloth, cambric, nainsook, etc., with wide frilled legs, embroidered or decorated with lace, ribbons, or insertions. They were close fitting in wool, silk, and mixture, plain or ribbed knit."

p. 148 women's sleepwear: nightgowns had square necks more often than round; they became less bulky due to wartime shortages "with low necks and short sleeves, or to be quite sleeveless" and more plain. Pajamas in the style of men's began to pick up during WWI.

Dissonant Details

The ultimate goal of sharing one's writing is for the reader to "get" what you've written. Seen from that point of view, what you've written is less important than how the reader interprets it. So it's important to try and direct the reader's interpretation if you can.

One way to do that is dissonance. As in, if two things in the story don't match up, you can grab the reader's attention for a second.

*heh* I mean two things that don't match up on purpose.

Here's a simple example of how to intrigue the reader. The hero is engaged in crawling through a muddy ditch to overhear a conversation that's all about smuggling weapons in baskets of puppies and is so close he gets kicked in the face by one of the smugglers as they leave the area. In the next scene, he meets the heroine and pretends to be falling-down drunk to explain how he got all muddy. The reader knows he's lying, so they wonder why, and keep reading to find out.

Then you can reveal the reason for the dissonance, whatever will cause the most conflict: the heroine has been carrying the puppies for the smugglers, but doesn't know about the weapons. Also, she's been in trouble before. Also, her father is the hero's lifelong enemy who shot his favorite horse for meanness when he was a child. Also, she thinks the hero steals puppies. Etc..

Dissonances are like little conflicts, in my mind. They're even better if their result is not immediately obvious. Perhaps not the first result you think of, but the fourth or fifth. We can get extra points for having devious minds, if we're writers.

They can be dissonances in point of view - one character knows something another doesn't, or another knows in a different way - or they can be dissonances in purely physical clues. Why does the heroine wear a slinky dress to transport puppies this time? Is it to impress the hero? Why, no...she's figured out something is wrong and is trying to seduce the Evil Smuggler to get information out of him.

I think it also works to stagger the dissonances to create suspense. A small thing that's off, and the reader might think it's a mistake, but when another, larger dissonance appears, the first makes more sense, and so on and so forth.

In a way, I'm reinventing the wheel here. But every time I think of a new way to think about writing, it teaches me something.

Three Tommies

Ivor Gurney, "The Bohemians"

The Bohemians

Certain people would not clean their buttons,
Nor polish buckles after latest fashions,
Preferred their hair long, putties comfortable,
Barely escaping hanging, indeed hardly able;
In Bridge and smoking without army cautions
Spending hours that sped like evil for quickness,
(While others burnished brasses, earned promotions)
These were those ones who jested in the trench,
While others argued of army ways, and wrenched
What little soul they had still further from shape,
And died off one by one, or became officers.
Without the first of dream, the ghost of notions
Of ever becoming soldiers, or smart and neat,
Surprised as ever to find the army capable
Of sounding 'Lights out' to break a game of Bridge,
As to fear candles would set a barn alight:
In Artois or Picardy they lie--free of useless fashions.

--Ivor Gurney

American Memory Film Collection

American Memory Film Collection at the Library of Congress.

Click on the title of the topic that interests you, then click on "List the Film Titles" for the individual film. That link will give you a choice of mpeg, rm, or QuickTime for most of the films. Which you can then watch. (Some of the topics are less straightforward, and you have to hunt a little for the list of available films.)

The coolness brings me near to weeping. These are real people I'm looking at, and it's a lot easier to realize that from film than from photographs.

These are mostly nonfiction films, out of copyright, very short. It's like magic. Like looking through a time machine.

You can also listen to some audio recordings. Ever wondered what Theodore Roosevelt's voice sounded like?

A Weird Dislike

It's very weird and pointless, I know, but I have an aversion to the phrase multi-published.

I understand what it means. It means you sold more than one story, or one book, and had it published. It's usually used to describe writers who are making a living from their work, but not always.

But why does it matter? If it does matter, why don't we say double-published and triple-published and on and on?

And does it count if you sell, say, one novel and one nonfiction essay? How about two short stories? Two pieces of flash fiction?

I just don't think it tells you anything, really. And it sounds like you're trying too hard to be accepted. "I'm not just any writer. I've been published multiple times."

Isn't published enough? Or professional writer? Or even just writer?

Am I missing some subtlety here?

Musings on Discovering/Implementing Theme in The Moonlight Mistress

Someone asked me fairly recently about how I use theme.

For me, I might think about theme ahead of time, but it doesn't really start to manifest until I've written a certain amount of the manuscript. Then I start realizing what my subconscious is trying to tell me (or maybe my conscious mind gives it a name and a shape). Like, for The Moonlight Mistress I knew wolves were a symbol of the wild, but linking the shapechanging idea to the human characters sank into my my mind gradually, influenced by something a transgendered woman had once told me about feeling she was a real-life shapechanger.

I decided that acting outside of conventional gender roles was also, in a way, like shapechanging, and I had plenty of characters who did that, whether by dressing and acting as the opposite gender, or performing a job usually associated with the other gender, or simply by not having a heteronormative sex life.

After I realized all that is when I start adding descriptive details throughout the manuscript to emphasize this theme and to, hopefully, bring the idea to the reader's attention. I examined all the characters and how I'd presented them, and thought about which ones were most like shapechangers, and how, and tried to emphasize that a little, indirectly. I also tried to do a little bit of mirroring, werewolves with humans.

I don't know if that kind of detail actually works for the reader or not, but I make the attempt. Even if it doesn't come through, it's fun to do! I'm also not sure if it really counts as theme if you're doing it on purpose. But I think it should count.

I'm still thinking about this myself, so I apologize if I sound a little vague. Your input is welcome!

Safer Sex in Erotica

Lisabet Sarai blogged on safer sex and erotic romance.

For me, it depends on the story's sub-genre.

In a fantastical setting, I don't usually mind if safer sex is not mentioned, because in science fiction or fantasy the issue can be easily covered by the worldbuilding (everybody has an injection! everybody has a spell!) even if the author hasn't mentioned it explicitly.

In historicals, I wish there was a bit more worrying about safe versus not-safe thoughts, but again I'm a little more accepting if safer sex is left out. However, I definitely appreciate it when historical characters think about the issue, even if it's only in the first intimate scene and left to the reader's assumption after that.

In contemporary novels, I prefer that safer sex be practiced, and if it isn't, that a reason I can accept is provided (obviously, not every writer can read my mind!). I don't mind if subsequent sex scenes aren't shown as safe, at least not so much, because I can extrapolate from scene number one, in much the way that I extrapolate the characters are eating, sleeping, and using the toilet even though those actions aren't necessarily described.

What do you think?

Backwards Outlining

I did not come up with this on my own; I got it from Sarah Monette back in 2003.

Backwards or reverse outlining is, essentially, seeing what you've already done. It's an aid to structure, and it's helped me more than once.

Take your completed novel draft. Outline it. What are the major ideas of each chapter, each scene?

Study your outline. What did you repeat too many times? What didn't you write about enough?

The outline itself can be angled to suit your purposes. You can outline from a character angle, or a plot angle, or a theme angle. (For me, it's usually the character angle.) You can break your novel down into fragments as small as you find helpful.

The purpose of the exercise is to look at the overall shape without being distracted by the pretty illustrations.

This also works for published books - you can get a good idea of the plot structure from outlining the central problems of each chapter, and seeing how the author resolved them.

Ivor Gurney, "The Silent One"

The Silent One

Who died on the wires, and hung
there, one of two--
Who for his hours of life had
chattered through
Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks
accent:
Yet faced unbroken wires;
stepped over, and went
A noble fool, faithful to his stripes
--and ended.
But I weak, hungry, and willing
only for the chance
Of line--to fight in the line, lay
down under unbroken
Wires, and saw the flashes and
kept unshaken,
Till the politest voice--a finicking
accent, said:
'Do you think you might crawl
through there: there's a hole.'
Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as
politely replied--
'I'm afraid not, Sir.' There was no
hole no way to be seen
Nothing but chance of death, after
tearing of clothes.
Kept flat, and watched the
darkness, hearing bullets whizzing—-
And thought of music--and
swore deep heart's oaths
(Polite to God) and retreated and
came on again,
Again retreated--a second time
faced the screen.

--Ivor Gurney

Anne Sexton, "Courage"

Courage

It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later, if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

--Anne Sexton, The Awful Rowing Toward God

Why Not Twentieth Century Historicals?

Why are so few (print) romance novels set in the twentieth century?

If you go to a bookstore and look at the section labelled "Romance," certain things are there and certain things are not. With the exception of occasional outliers like Harlequin's line of 20th century "decade" books-- a line of categories that some bookstores didn't carry, and which was then closed down--historicals seem to include only a few periods.

The highest proportion of historicals set in Britain and Europe are set in the 19th century, with the Regency era far surpassing the earlier Georgian period (technically, Regency is still Georgian, I know--but in Romance the distinction seems to be made that way). Medievals seem to be a much smaller slice of the market, as are Victorians. Sometimes, you get something set in the Renaissance, mostly in Italy, or in France during the Revolution. (There are always exceptions, and I love exceptions, so please tell me your favorites!)

American history seems to consist of the Civil War and the "western expansion" era of the late 19th and sometimes very early 20th century. I have seen some paranormal authors, for example Susan Krinard, write books that take place at least partly on the US East Coast in the 19th century, but that isn't common. Occasionally someone writes a book set in the American Revolution, usually including some intersection between Americans and British. Suzanne Brockmann got away with some WWII content mixed with contemporary in some of her Navy SEALS romance/suspense novels, but I note that she's stopped doing that some time ago; her current series is all contemporary. And that is mostly it, at least that I can think of.

Why is this? Who decided? Are more current time periods--the 1920s through, say, the 1970s--seen as less interesting? Are writers simply not producing books set in those periods, or is it that publishers don't want them? Have they tried them, and they don't sell? Is it just too weird for people to read about a period they lived through, or that their parents lived through? Is the recent past too close to us, and does it disrupt the fantasy aspects of the story? Do we know too much that's disturbing about our recent history?

Aside from all those issues, it may be part of the problem that one researches a romance partially by reading other romances to see the shape of the genre, and there are few predecessors for romances set during more recent historical periods (what about novels contemporary to those periods, from the 1960s and 1970s, for example?).

Or could it be the fault of readers that 20th century historicals aren't popular? Regular readers of, say, Regencies, acquire a basic grasp of that time period. In relation to periods in which one never lived, what if the majority of readers don't want to learn about a new time period, since they're happy in the one they've chosen?

Since we're well into the twenty-first century now, perhaps it's time to think more about writing books set in the twentieth.

How to Write - Linkgasm #4

I visited Lauren Dane's blog yesterday for Writerly Wednesday, to talk about Dialog Tricks.

Also, Great War Fiction, one of my favorite blogs, reviewed The Moonlight Mistress yesterday! Here's the link. It's so cool to be meandering about, reading your usual blog feeds, and something like this pops up.

But enough about me.

The Magic Treehouse Writing Lessons. No, really. Have a look. Especially if you're stuck on something.

A really great post on Craft, Story, and Voice by Rachelle Gardner.

How to write a novel in 100 days or less, by John Coyne. It's a day-by-day guide with some excellent advice which bears repeating.

Anita Burgh has a lot of good, direct advice.

I don't think I'm organized enough to use the snowflake method of writing a novel, but it's an interesting approach.

If you've never read The Turkey City Lexicon, why not? It's not just applicable to writing science fiction.

An Insider's Guide to Writing for Mills and Boon in The Guardian.

History by Decades gives brief information about (mostly European) history, by decade, from 1650-2000. It's more a useful source to spark further research.

And just for fun, the Hollywood Plot-O-Matic.

The photograph is of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

I Like Being Reviewed

I like getting reviews of my work.

Not everyone does. Not everyone is required to like it, or even to read reviews of their work. But some of us like reading reviews and commentary (which is how I think of feedback that states it isn't intended as a review, or is briefer or less thorough than a review).

Reviews can give me a new way to think about my work. I like it when they confirm an opinion I already had about the story. I like it when they identify weaknesses, so I can think about those and how I might strengthen those weaknesses next time. I don't directly make changes, but I might be influenced. The best thing is when a reviewer comments on something they liked or even disliked - and even if they disliked it, if it's something I did on purpose, it makes me happy that my intentions came through.

Reviews, of course, aren't always pleasant to read. If there's one that's too difficult for you to read without becoming overly angry or upset, my recommendation is not to read it, or not to finish reading it if you've started, and most especially not to comment and read the comments of others. I think most writers would agree it's best not to argue with reviewers, because their opinions as readers are just as valid as those of the writer. Maybe return in a few days when you've had a chance to think it through, if you can then read with a clear head. But there's no law that says you're required to read every review of your work.

I especially love gaining new insights from commentary on my books - how do readers perceive what I've written? I want to know if they liked certain characters, their favorite scenes, and what they wish would have happened, or happened differently; the things they loved, the things that made them angry. Their thoughts and interpretations give the novel new life; their opinions help me to see the story from the outside, as a reader might. Since I write things I'd like to read, to me this is extremely important. I feel a little moment of wonder every time.

Even more than all those considerations, I like having my books reviewed because it means someone read the book. "Silly," you say. "Thousands of people read your book." (Or however many it was. I'm guestimating.)

That isn't the point.

Sure, I know that copies sold. I see it in bookstores. I have all sorts of figures. It's still not the same as having a stranger tell you what they thought. And that is different from having a friend read the book and tell you what they thought. The feedback in a review is coming from what was on the page. It's feedback from someone who is more interested in the book itself than in its author.

Since I'm the author and I already know about me, I want to know about my book, unaffected by anything else. I want to know if anything in it struck the reader as true or meaningful, or if they loved a certain character, or wished an event had turned out differently. It's a special treat to find out. It doesn't matter, at base level, if the reviewer hated the book or loved it. What matters is that they went to the trouble of writing about it, and sharing their view of the novel's world with me. Thousands don't bother.

Romance in Short

Having written a short romance story last month, I naturally had to think about how to do it. I've written many short stories, but I would classify them all as erotica whether or not they were romantic. This was the first time I'd explicitly tried to write a romance, meaning a story in which the romance was the primary focus. (And I hadn't written a short story in quite some time.)

I had planned to have several different angles to the story. First, it was to be a historical, set during the Crimean War, in which the hero would be participating. Second, there was to be time travel, a traveler from the far future to the 1850s. Third, I'd decided the time traveler was herself from the past, but had been brought to the future. And fourth, there had to be a romance.

You can see where the trouble lies. It's just too much for a short story, even one with a length of 6,000 - 10,000 words. To establish the heroine's backstory would require additional space; comparing it to the other elements, I decided it was unnecessary. Out it went. The time travel aspect itself, in my first version, required considerable setup. I needed wordcount to explain who the heroine was, what her world was like, why she was doing what she was doing, and why the reader should care about her and her actions. All that before the story truly began.

I abandoned that entire approach, and decided the time travel element would be as mysterious to the reader as to the point of view character. That way, I'd be sure to include only information the reader needed to know to follow the main idea of the story: that a time traveler falls in love with someone in the past. It gave me more space to concentrate on the development of the characters and their relationship.

The other important thing I learned is that an entire courtship is difficult to condense. There needs to be enough there for the reader to become emotionally involved despite the limited wordcount. One approach is to show only part of their relationship, for instance their initial meeting, or their reunion after a long separation. The other key points along their personal relationship timeline can then be dropped in with hints or references. The approach I took was to condense their relationship using pressure. They don't know each other for very much time at all, but the time they do spend together is very intense, and in the midst of a dangerous situation. Months pass between the times they meet, but I condense the time they are not together, making sure they are together in the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

I'm still not sure I'm satisfied with the pacing I chose. But it was a valuable experiment.

Guest at Midnight Moon Cafe

I'm a guest today over at Midnight Moon Cafe, on "Making the Paranormal Real - Boundaries and Consequences."

e.e. cummings, "may my heart always be open to little"

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

--e.e. cummings

e.e. cummings, "you being in love... (XII)"

you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."

--e.e. cummings

Write Your Bliss

You can have all the craft in the world but your writing won't sing if you're not writing your bliss, your joy, the one thing you love more than anything else in the world.

It's no good to say, "vampire novels always sell so I will write a vampire novel" if you don't love vampires. Love them. Okay, some people manage it, and they sell, and they sell well, but that's not my point here.

My point here is that most of us don't write purely for the money. If all we wanted was money, we would get a job that paid a lot more per hour than writing. (Like maybe bagging groceries.) I also think that getting joy from writing is part of your payment. And I think readers can tell if you feel that interest and joy; if you feel it, they are more likely to feel it, too. Agents and editors can feel it, too.

What better way to write something different than to write what you are desperate to read, but that isn't already out there?

Your bliss is what makes you unique. And if you want people to read your work, it needs that spark. It needs joy.

There aren't a whole lot of erotic novels set during World War One, and I don't know of any with werewolves. But I love reading about World War One, and I love science fiction and fantasy. So I wrote about those things. And I had a blast. As a result, I think it was good work, better work than I'd done before.

Write your bliss.

Related Post:
Wacky Story Elements and Laura Kinsale.

How Publishing Works, via Charles Stross

I don't usually post a set of links from a single author, but in this case, I am, because I think these are excellent reference posts that go a long way to explaining common misconceptions to those who have not yet experienced the wonder and confusion and WTF that is print publishing.

Some very informative and useful posts by science fiction/fantasy Charles Stross about print publishing:

Common Misconceptions About Publishing, which talks about the hierarchies of publishing companies and companies that own publishing companies, and a bit about how all that works.

How Books Are Made. This post describes the process of turning a manuscript into a published book.

What Authors Sell to Publishers. Rights, and other legal matters, and why sometimes you can buy a book in one country but not in another.

Why Books Are the Length They Are, with some speculation on how electronic publishing might change that.

And one post speculating on the future of electronic publishing:
The Future of Web Publishing.

I'd worry if they talked back.

Today I'm in the Author Spotlight at Jessica Freely's blog Friskbiskit, talking about the male/male relationship aspects of The Moonlight Mistress, among other things.

#

And for today's pondering:

How do we visualize (mentalize?) characterization? I've heard people say things like, "My characters refused to do that," or "they said they wanted to do this instead."

So, for those of you who use that kind of language about your writing, do you really feel like you have a separate, imaginary person in your head speaking? Or is it just shorthand, a way of conceptualizing subconscious decisions? Or does it feel like they're speaking even though you know it's all you? Or something entirely different?

I talk about my characters often as if they're real people, and think about them that way, though I don't expect to meet them or anything. They are real, in the sense that art is real. But I don't understand how they could do what I don't want them to do. If I'm having trouble with a scene, I try to stop thinking about it, and my subconscious chews it over and spits out more ideas, and I decide which one I like. If the idea doesn't work once it's written out in prose, I try something else, but I still feel I am the actor, I am making the choices. Maybe it's just me, and I can't free my mind to the extent that makes the characters take on their own life. Or maybe my conceptualization techniques are simply different.

I'd be really interested to hear thoughts on this.

Related Posts:
Learning Who Your Characters Are.
Caring About Your Characters – Or Not.
Kinesics in Fiction.

Research Books Whee!

I'm in a research flurry, collecting materials that I hope will be helpful in writing my second erotic novel set during World War One.

I do the dance of new books!

The Belgian Army in World War I is another Osprey book. These are slender but packed, packed I tell you, with detailed information and drawings. Since my heroine is Belgian, I wanted to do a little more work on the army from her country. I shamefully neglected them last time. Also, some of them had shakos. I am terribly envious of the shakos.

I've been meaning to get Santanu Das' Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature and read it for quite a while now. I'm hoping it will have some discussion in the vein of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. I don't know if I will directly use this book, but I have a feeling it will influence me indirectly or subconsciously.

The Sexual History of the World War is a 1941 translation from the German. The author, Magnus Hirschfeld, was described as "The World's Greatest Sanitarian, Psychosexual Physician and Creator of the Sexual Sciences." It's...interesting. The primary reason I'm reading it is to get a handle on ways people thought about sex and eroticism during the WWI time period. Times have certainly changed. Both the scholarship and the scholarly views on sex this book gives are very...historical. I described it to a friend as "every page you get three new WTFs."

A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century by Ben Shephard is a 2003 book. It "chronicles military psychiatry in the 20th century." I might only read the WWI section for now, and save the rest for a time when I have more leisure.

Tammy M. Proctor's Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War has been on my wishlist for quite a while. I did read relevant sections of some other books on female spies in WWI for The Moonlight Mistress, but I'm hoping this book will be even more helpful. Especially since I want More Spies in my new novel.

Finally, 1915: the Death of Innocence by Lyn Macdonald isn't actually new to my collection. Despite buying it many months ago, I'd never opened it, since I didn't want to confuse myself on what happened when (The Moonlight Mistress all happens in 1914). I'm assuming this will be as unbelievably useful to me as 1914: The Days of Hope by the same author. First-person accounts are some of the most useful material for my purposes.

Books!

The Trapped Protagonist

Over at the Romance Divas forum for the next three months, I'm serving as mentor to another writer. As a result, I've been thinking about plotting and how to plot and how to teach to plot. And how to teach one to teach one's self how to plot. *whew*

To help out my thinking, I've been browsing among various articles, books, saved messages, etc. that I saved thinking I would get to them later, when I needed them. I'm not reading any of it closely, just skimming, and letting ideas come together in my head, loosely and probably confusingly connected. Yes, it's my usual "let the backbrain do it!" methodology.

I remember being taught in school about the external conflict and the internal conflict. But how about in relation to plot? There are plots where the characters go somewhere physically, and plots where they don't travel far at all. This physical placement of the characters can be related to what type of conflict they're experiencing.

Right now, I'm more intrigued by the trapped protagonist, perhaps because I haven't explored it much in my own writing, yet.

If the protagonist is trapped somewhere - in a house, in a town, in a network of tunnels, in a relationship - the tension of the story is automatically ramped up. The character is trapped and wants to escape. The barriers she has to overcome are right in her face, perhaps even familiar to her (her home town taken over by the Children of the Corn! her own husband turning into a vampire!). It's claustrophobic. Her emotions can be compressed like the space, and then explode with concomitant force.

Plus, there's making old things new again. If the character is in a familiar setting, perhaps the town where she grew up, people and things surrounding her haven't necessarily changed. But she is changing in the course of the book, so her perceptions of familiar things will change. That's movement. That's part of the plot arc.

Suddenly, I'm seeing another level to the appeal of the Gothic novel.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, "The Messages"

The Messages

"I cannot quite remember.... There were five
Dropt dead beside me in the trench--and three
Whispered their dying messages to me...."

Back from the trenches, more dead than alive,
Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee,
He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly:

"I cannot quite remember.... There were five
Dropt dead beside me in the trench--and three
Whispered their dying messages to me...."

"Their friends are waiting, wondering how they thrive--
Waiting a word in silence patiently....
But what they said, or who their friends may be

"I cannot quite remember.... There were five
Dropt dead beside me in the trench--and three
Whispered their dying messages to me...."

--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Art has a shape.

"One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape; they have beginnings, middles, and endings. Whereas in life, things just drift along. In life, somebody has a cold, and you treat it as insignificant, and suddenly they die. Or they have a heart attack, and you are sodden with grief until they recover to live for thirty petulant years, demanding you wait on them. You think a love affair is ending, and you are gripped with Anna Karenina-ish drama, but two weeks later the guy is standing in your doorway, arms stretched up on the molding, jacket hanging open, a sheepish look on his face, saying, "Hey, take me back, will ya?" Or you think a love affair is high and thriving, and you don't notice that over the past months it has dwindled, dwindled, dwindled. In other words, in life one almost never has an emotion appropriate to an event. Either you don't know the event is occurring, or you don't know its significance. We celebrate births and weddings; we mourn deaths and divorces; yet what are we celebrating, what mourning? Rituals mark feelings, but feelings and events do not coincide. Feelings are large and spread over a lifetime. I will dance the polka with you and stamp my feet with vigor, celebrating every energy I have ever felt. But those energies were moments, not codifiable, not certifiable, not able to be fixed: you may be seduced into thinking my celebration is for you. Anyway, that is a thing art does for us: it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear. Whereas in life, from moment to moment, one can't tell an onion from a piece of dry toast."

--Marilyn French, The Women's Room

Maintaining Sexual and Romantic Tension

I think that all Romance plots ultimately involve deferring consummation of the relationship, whether the desired consummation is intercourse, marriage, a marriage proposal, or simple acknowledgement by the couple that they are in love. If a consummation happens at the novel's beginning, then either internal or external circumstances must conspire to prevent a second, deeper consummation until the novel's end. (I hesitate to use the word climax. Heh.)

Tension, both sexual and narrative, is produced by various devices. Some of them include: The Big Misunderstanding, The Big Assumption, The Dark Moment, Seemingly Incompatible Characters, Cultural Conflict, Necessary Lies (espionage, investigation, protecting the other), Chased by Headhunting Mutants. I feel these can be divided into internal or external conflicts; the best way is to combine the two. Good authors will use personal conflict between their characters even if the base conflict is social/cultural/external; obviously, this is applicable to more than just Romance.

Similar personalities with differing goals also produce conflict; also, goals that appear to differ but turn out to be the same. If the characters have common feelings and goals, the slow growth of intimacy as they get to know each other can maintain tension, though usually at a lower level than conflict. Alternately, their similar feelings and goals can be disguised from them through external means: they are too caught up in outside events like the French Revolution, for example.

The trick is to make the romance happen among all that conflict. Though working together to survive a conflict is a good step along the way to friendship as well as romance.

Thoughts?

My thanks to coffeeandink and daedala, who helped me talk this through a while back.

Kinesics in Fiction

The body language of one's characters of course must have something in common with the readers' experience, or it won't communicate anything to them. But how to make descriptions of body language interesting? And reveal character in the specific as well as in the general sense? And be clear to the reader but at the same time be as invisible as the word said in one's prose?

I tend to focus on the characters' eyes and on their hands. They often glance at each other, meet each other's eyes, or look down or away. They touch another's arm or hand. Habits are also useful. A character who is a smoker might have a whole separate vocabulary: when he is agitated, he might chain-smoke and fling the butts away into the darkness; when contemplating, he might light up slowly and blow smoke through his nostrils in long streams.

I also tend to have characters eat and drink while engaged in dialogue. In my earlier work, the characters ate all the time, in scene after scene. True, I could work in worldbuilding details about what they ate, and character details about how they ate it, but after a certain point it became ludicrous. A coffee-loving friend informed me that one of my manuscripts left her craving coffee because the characters indulged in it so much. I've become more careful since then.

I think body language is something to which I can't pay close attention while I'm drafting, for fear of distracting myself from more important matters. But it's a prime subject for when I'm rereading and editing.

A character's body language can embody, pun intended, their emotions and some of their habitual traits and give them additional meaning. Graceful movements versus abrupt, jerky movements. A slow, weary pace instead of a brisk, lively one. A movement towards a touch, cut short.

The possibilities are endless.

Cell Phones Make Life Difficult (For Writers)

When Tanya Huff's vampire novels were made into a television series, Blood Ties, the original novels were re-released. The first time I read those books, I'd borrowed them from a friend. This time, I bought my own copies, since I was in the mood to reread them.

(This post is not about that television show, but I thought a visual of one of the show's leads might interest some of you.)

What interested me most about the reissued novels was in Tanya Huff's introduction. She noted that when the books were originally published, cell phones were not at all common. There were several plot incidents in the books that would have gone quite differently if the characters had been able to call each other!

When I think of plot and cell phones, the first show that pops into my mind is always The X-Files. Mulder and Scully were nearly glued to their phones, often exchanging huge chunks of dialogue while at widely-separated locations. In that case, cell phones became part of the world in which they operated, and integral parts of the story. Mulder and Scully with their cell phones also became part of the visual language of the show.

I think it's a little trickier to integrate cell phones with novels. For one thing, a phone conversation requires extra writing decisions, such as how much to reveal of the "other" side of the conversation, how to include sensual details in among the dialogue, etc.. But much more importantly, how many plots would evaporate if the characters could only call someone for help? Not to mention all the thousands of applications that now go along with cell phones? If the characters need to be without their cell phones for something to happen, is it now obligatory to spend words on working in a reason? (I can't help but be reminded of all the transporter issues they had to come up with in Star Trek.)

I can think of three approaches one could use. The first is to remove the cell phone at the point of action: heroine drops her cell out of the helicopter, the werewolf eats the hero's cell phone, the hero who's been using his cell as a GPS for days runs out of power at a critical moment. The second is to set up the lack of cell phone earlier in the story, which of course one can do by backtracking in one's manuscript to create foreshadowing (your key to quality literature!). For instance, the heroine despises cell phones because she doesn't like people calling her while she's browsing in libraries, or the hero's magical powers interfere with technology. The third is to have the character use the cell phone, but it isn't any help - he gets voicemail when being attacked by a zombie, or she doesn't have the phone number she needs.

No, wait, there's a fourth option: no cell phones at all. But that's a worldbuilding decision that will have a whole host of subsidiary effects.

Alison's Wonderland Cover

Behold the cover for the 7/1/2010 Spice anthology Alison's Wonderland! Isn't it amazing? Click on the image for a larger version.

My contribution is a small (very small!) reprint of one of my Elspeth Potter stories.

Pondering the Mail-Order Bride

I had another thought about Western romances.

Does the reason the "mail-order bride" plot is so popular in Western romances have anything to do with the idea that marriage is linked to civilization? In that case, marriage could be civilization, and imposing it upon two people can be likened to imposing a farm onto a wilderness, or law upon a den of outlaws.

True, the mail-order bride isn't usually forced legally to marry, but she often takes that action under force of circumstances. Circumstances, interestingly, that usually arise in the East, supposedly a place of "civilization."

Is there a subtle commentary going on here, that the "civilized" world isn't, and that the new, improved civilization is the looser, freer world of the frontier? A commentary also, perhaps, on the European historical, particularly the rigid Regency or Victorian, versus the "new" world of America?

I am probably reading way too much into this.

Related post:
The Intricacies of Marriages of Convenience.