The Magic of teh Lurv

We’re having a special Valentine’s giveaway over on the Here Be Magic blog over the next few days. Your chance to win that most special treat for any reader: gift cards to Amazon or Barnes & Noble. (Winner’s choice.) All you have to do is comment.

The Here Be Magic group is interesting. It’s the group blog for all the Carina Press fantasy authors, with “fantasy” being loosely defined. Carina has been doing a great job of acquiring and publishing some terrific science fiction, urban fantasy, paranormal and fantasy, with and without romantic elements.

Interestingly, however, the word is that the community of sci fi and fantasy readers have been slow to adopt eBooks. This seems counter-intuitive to all of us, because those readers, I would think, would be into computers and gadgets and tech. But not for books, apparently. So we’ve been thinking of ways to reach the paper-book readers and entice them with a digital book. Any ideas are welcome.

Have a lovely weekend everyone!

Introducing: Rogue’s Pawn

http://browse.deviantart.com/?q=thorns&order=9&offset=24#/dl15xhI’m thrilled to announce that The Novel Formerly Known as Obsidian has been officially retitled!

Please welcome into the world:

 

Rogue’s Pawn

 

This title is really just so perfect that I’ve been giddy with delight.

AND… even better. I have a series title, too!

Rogue’s Pawn will be the first book in

 

A Covenant of Thorns

 

I’m over the moon about having a series title and have been twirling and dancing in my head ever since.

So, join me in celebrating!  Champagne all around!!

Please Answer the Security Question

At my dayjob, I have to change my password every six months.

Such is the tyranny of IT.

And really, I understand. I do. I mean, sure, a part of me wonders what bereft soul out there truly wants to hack into my user accounts to obtain all sorts of deadly dry government reports. I can just imagine this villian. “Bwah ha ha ha! I refuse to capitulate to regular channels and FOIA this! I shall STEAL the information and then… and then… I shall HAVE it!”

This is why I don’t write espionage novels.

The thing is, I’ve been coming up with passwords for over twenty years now. Most of us have. When the whole computer thing, followed very quickly by the computer security thing, started ramping up, I had a system for passwords. I had a low-security password that I used for all sorts of non-financially related information, a medium-security one for more sensitive stuff and a high-security one for stuff that connected to money.

Yeah – I have nothing more important than money to protect.

Back then, I understood my tiering system. It was based on a coding only I understood. I easily remembered my passwords. Then they started telling me how my passwords should be. You know what I mean. More letters. Symbols. No leading or following numbers. And with complication the IT folks developed to foil hackers, the less likely they made it for me to remember all the contortions of my passwords. In fact, my passwords have gotten more consistent in many ways, because I don’t dare add my arcane spin on top of all of theirs.

And then.

The security questions started in.

Yeah, I know I’m supposed to know the answers to these things. After all, I put them in. Still, when I’m trying to transfer money in between conference calls and the computer asks me for the name of my first pet, I have to pause and think. What would have the past tense me have answered? The dog we had when I was born? The cat who was run over on the highway when I was four? The first cat that was really mine?

Or name of my paternal grandmother? Come on guys – like I have only one paternal grandmother?? We live in an age of multiply blended families. Did I pick my blood father’s mother or the mother of the stepfather who raised me? Besides, I always called her “Grandmother” – how did she spell her name again?

And don’t get me started on those first grade teacher ones. I had a team of six teachers (as I recall) and I can think of the names of about half of them. Favorite sports team? I don’t watch sports. Favorite song – are you kidding me?? When people ask me for my favorite song, book, movie, dessert, beetle or Beatle, I generally pick whichever feels shiniest to me at that moment. I don’t dare record that and hope to remember what past tense me thought she liked on any given day. As for my high school mascot, I can never remember if I think it’s singular or plural, the full name or the shortened version.

Recently, with the big Zappos hacking, I had to relinquish my low-security password. It was past time and I knew I had to do it. But it was my first password, nice and obscure, but I’ve been using it easily since 1988, I kid you not. I used it on sites like Zappos – the ones that insist I register as a customer, but with no consequences. I really didn’t care if someone ran amuck on Zappos masquerading as me, since I didn’t store any personal information on there. What were they going to do – screw up my shoe size preference?

Still, Zappos kindly sent me a warning saying that, if I used this password anywhere else, I should probably change it.

You people would not believe how many places I’ve used this one stinking password. I’m still finding them. It’s like cleaning out nearly twenty-five years of basement crap. And then examining each thing, cleaning it and slapping a brand new, infinitely more complicated password on it.

So, tell me I”m not alone in my rant. What’s the worst security question you’ve encountered?

Respecting the Tropes

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately that I wouldn’t normally pick up.

That’s because I’m judging for the Romance Writers of America (RWA) RITA awards. This is the romance genre’s version of the Hugo or the Oscar. Yeah, there might be some out there already snorting in disdain, but for our genre, this is one of the highest awards you can get. The first round is entirely peer-judged. As in, if you want to enter your book for the RITA, then you must judge. Thus, in mid-January, I received eight novels to read by the beginning of March.

We do get to pick categories, but otherwise I am reading books by authors I have never read before. All of them are a bit of a stretch from my normal pleasure reading. We’re asked to judge the book entirely on its quality and not whether or not we enjoy that particular kind of story, which is also a different lens.

It’s been interesting. And I’m over halfway through my pile, amazingly enough.

One of them is a new author discovery for me now. I gave her book a perfect score and look forward to reading more. Another, in a sub-genre I rarely read, I ranked very high. I don’t know that I’ll pick up her books again, for myself, but I could recognize how well she executed her craft.

One book, though written decently, failed as a romance, in my opinion. Oh, she had all the plot points in there. She faithfully followed the tropes, but they continued to feel empty to me. Contrived, even, which romance is so frequently accused of being.

So, here’s where I make a leap into a series of assumptions. I’m theorizing and obviously have no hard data to back up my ideas here. 

It’s no secret that the romance genre is making big bucks these days. A fact that seems to seriously annoy all those who consider romance not worthwhile. Latest stats from RWA: $1.36 billion in sales each year, the largest share of the consumer-book market, more than a quarter of all books sold are romance. What writer doesn’t want some of that pie?

More and more, I’m seeing writers of other genres coming over to the romance field, to pump up their sales. Or adding touches of romance, in order to sell it on that shelf. And sure, sometimes this is the work of the publisher or marketing department, trying to slide in under that umbrella.

The thing is, it’s difficult to wield a trope you don’t love. See, a trope is like a cliché or an archetype. They can be powerful devices or cardboard dummies. A good romance embraces the full emotionalism of people coming together, with all the silliness, hearts, flowers, flying cupids, spats, passion, grand gestures and breathless, intimate moments that implies. It’s not easy to write  clichés in a new, vivid and heartfelt way. But if a writer doesn’t tap into that deep store of energy that fuels the tropes in our hearts and minds, then all of that becomes cliché in the worst possible sense.

All of us romance readers love to giggle at the tropes. There are great blogs out there that encourage these discussions. We laugh at the impossibly virginal, feisty heroine and the alpha-male hero who also cooks and loves to brush her hair. And yet, when it’s done right, we also sigh in dreamy delight, and follow their story with fervent attention.

Why? Because the author takes the tropes and breathes life into them.

That doesn’t happen if the author, deep-down, doesn’t respect the tropes.

We might poke fun at the tropes like we roll our eyes at our husbands not being able to find anything without us, but if someone else makes out like our husbands are worthless? Oh no no no.

Use the power of the trope, young author.

But beware of taking it lightly.

Letting the Babies Stay Dead

There’s a long-used term in the writing and publishing world: Kill Your Babies.

This is, of course, a euphemism for being willing to recognize which parts of your work are, well, self-indulgent tripe that needs to be cut. For some reason, it’s often the bits we’re most emotionally attached to in our work that needs to be deleted. I suspect it has something to do with that very attachment that makes those parts not good enough. We’re too invested in the meaning to ourselves to have perspective on how it contributes to the story.

Regardless, we all learn at some point to kill our babies.

What this means for most of us, though, is that we delete the offending passage or section and paste it into a document we save. We call it “Outtakes” maybe, and we keeps it forever, Precious. No, the baby isn’t dead, it’s just…Sleeping. I’m sure there are some ruthless, emotionally balanced authors out there who really, truly delete and forever nuke their babies. But many of us have them, little shriveled corpses in the basements of our laptops, that – who knows? – could one day be reanimated! The baby could live again!

The other day I re-watched Notting Hill, one of my all-time favorite movies. (I know this is my second reference to a movie rewatch. I have this Cold Virus That Will Not Die, and so I’ve been spending a lot of time reclining on the couch, alas.) At any rate, I love this movie so much, that I own it. This time I noticed there are special features and, basking in the glow of the Notting Hill love, I watched those, too. They included Deleted Scenes.

Hot Damn! MOAR Notting Hill to love!

The thing is? Those deleted scenes really sucked. They deserved to be deleted. I don’t know what went wrong with them, but they weren’t in line with the crispness of the rest of the movie. Whoever made the decision to cut those scenes exercised excellent judgment. Afterwards, I was kind of sorry I’d watched them. They diluted my glow ever so slightly with their badness.

And it made me think of all the babies I’ve been saving, just in case I can reanimate them. I’ve noticed a blog trend lately where writers are posting deleted sections of their novels or manuscripts. Kind of a fun thing – like the deleted scenes in the special features – and everyone is always looking for blog topics. Still, I’m wondering if it’s a good idea. If something isn’t good enough to stay in the story, it probably shouldn’t be read by anyone besides your CPs and your editor – who are likely the ones who told you to get rid of it in the first place.

After all, none of us really wants anyone to know about all those zombie babies in the basement. It might look bad.

I’m thinking mine might deserve a decent burial.

Sand, Sun and the Erotic Story Arc

I’m starting to think beach.

Not this particular beach, but the one I’ll be visiting in Pensacola, Florida for the Silken Sands Conference March 16-18. I’m so looking forward to this conference, not just for the warm and the beach, but because it’s a small conference packed with a lot of really great people. Two of my favorite editors, Angela James (Carina Press) and Grace Bradley (Ellora’s Cave) will be there, along with Holly Blanck (St. Martin’s) who I’d like to be one of my favorite editors. 😀 There will also be fabulous author friends there and I’m looking forward to hanging with them.

So, I’m working up my presentation in my head. Brewing it up so I can start making some slides. My workshop? The Erotic Story Arc: Not a Contradiction in Terms.

Yeah – you know what I mean.

A lot of people think an erotic story is simply porn and nothing more. And – hey, let’s face it – some can be. Over on Word Whores this week, we’ve been having an interesting debate on action scenes and whether we skim them as readers. The consensus has been that both action scenes and sex scenes suffer by being all stage direction without real story. So, in the erotic story, the sexual interaction takes center stage, but it still must serve to move the character from one place to another. That’s the core of a story: how the characters change.

Often the change in the characters in an erotic story is the simple coming together. They start out strangers and end up together – classic romantic story arc. There’s also the sexual journey, which usually involves some kind of self-discovery. I like the stories about breaking taboos or old beliefs, liberating the characters to embrace more of the world than they did before.

Any that I’m missing? I’m also looking for suggestions, of really well-done erotic stories that were also moving and meaningful.

And, if you want to see my workshop or just come hang at the beach with some fab writing and publishing people, you can still register!