Newest Adventure

This week brought a bit of good news for those of you waiting for the third book in the Enemy series (the follow up to Enemy Within  and Enemy Games - tentative title: Enemy Storm). While that book is in the works and has no release date as of yet, I may have a brief diversion to offer: an erotic novella set in the Enemy universe. If you read Enemy Within, you may recognize the hero of this novella, called Enemy Mine. (Yes, I know about the 1985 movie - I'm bummed I don't get to cast young Dennis Quaid in my novella - but he's all wrong for the role. Sigh.)

Berkley will be publishing Enemy Mine in April of 2012 as an e-book only. This week, my editor emailed to say she had no revisions and the story was headed straight to copy editing. Yay! That no revisions thing is a great tribute to my very thorough critique partners. Thank you, guys!

I don't have a cover yet, but the moment I do, I'll post that.

What possessed me to write a short erotica? I wanted to see whether I could. When I started the story, I doubted that I could write erotica. One of my good friends, Jeffe Kennedy, writes BDSM erotica, as well as contemporary fantasy. She acted as my writing mentor, pointing out where I'd gone astray with the romance or the emotional content. Between her explaining certain psychological aspects of erotica content and author Laura Bickel's excellent editing advice, the story went together relatively easily. I even flattered myself that it wasn't terrible. My local critique group, comprised of Darcy Carson, Lisa Wanttaja, Melinda Rucker-Haynes, DeeAnna Galbraith and Tina Larson helped iron out the rough bits.

Now. The story. Here's the back cover copy:

"It was a priority-two alert for beautiful Commander Cashel Khaleize: a contract put out on the life of Xiao Zhong. Professionally, Xiao was the Captain she reported to. Personally, he was man she desired.  But as female Guild Assassin Mekise Tollenga closes in, Xiao wonders if even Cashel can be trusted with his safety. And with a tenuous bond between them, Cashel wonders how far she’s willing to go to earn that trust."

How to Up Your Contest Scores in Three (not so) Easy Steps

This blog post is the result of a conversation Jeffe Kennedy and I had while she was in the midst of contest judging. As we compared notes, we realized we were seeing the same issues time and time again. So here's *my* version of How to Up Your Contest Scores in Three (not so) Easy Steps!

1. Cut to the chase - All of that lovely set up you've done showing us how your heroine's life sucks, yet what a wonderful gal she is? Yeah. Cut it. All of it. Drop us directly into the moment of crisis - the moment when everything goes to hell in a handbasket. Here's where my advice will differ from Jeffe's because I'm very much into the whole action/adventure thing. Your opening line should be the moment that your character's life is changed forever - he or she doesn't have to realize that's what's happening - but your reader should. Line one of my first book, Enemy Within: "Sun glinting off the barrel of a gun stopped Captain Ari Idylle dead in her tracks."

The first line from Jeffe's novella, Feeding the Vampire: "“I’ll do it,” I said."

Neither of those openings gives you a whole bunch of information, but both openings tell you that each heroine is about to have a day unlike any that's come before - even if neither of us tell you a single thing about the days that came before. Some of our other works give you a sentence or two of normal life before everything comes crashing down, but if you hear yourself saying "But you need to know this in order to understand..." No. Really. We don't. You need to know that in order to motivate your characters so they can stay true to themselves even while circumstances force them to change. Your readers only need tidbits of backstory sprinkled into the text AFTER the inciting incident (the alien abduction, the zombie attact, the hot guy in the beat up car dented her new BMW, whatever).

If you're receiving feedback like: Backstory dump, or Story starts in wrong place - this is where you want to start. Dump us straight into the action of your story along with your character and we won't be able to help but get yanked in along with him or her.

2. Internal conflict, external conflict. Know the difference and understand that romance requires only internal conflict. External conflict is icing. If you are writing a romance novel, your characters must be a danger to one another on an emotional level - this is internal conflict. It can be as simple as he's a cop and she saw the hell her mother went through every day because she loved a man whose work put him in the line of fire - then he died in the line of duty and the heroine swore she'd never do that to herself. In order for that romance to work, he has to convince her to accept risk and love and potential loss as a part of life. That's internal conflict. The drug war involving local street gangs is external conflict. In a romance novel, external conflict should, ideally, heighten the internal conflict in some way (either forces the hero or heroine to accept the need to change, shows up the vast differences in belief structures, etc) I like knowing why my hero and heroine are a danger to one another. So I ask that specifically when I'm first planning out a story. How is this guy a risk to her? How is she a risk to him? In one of my stories that's still in the planning stages, the hero has to drain the heroine's lifeforce in order to gain his freedom. He's a risk to her not just because he has to kill her, but because he has access to her every memory and there are some memories she's not willing to live with. She's a risk to him because she has the skill and knowledge to destroy him. They each have the other's lives in their hands. Did I mention they're sharing a body? Yes. This *is* intended to be a romance. So how are they going to work all of that out? There. You now understand internal conflict. So many obstacles, yet somehow, these two have to unbend enough to work together and maybe even fall in love. The external conflict - a bad guy kidnapping and hurting kids - works to force these two characters to face their fears, resentments, and prejudices. It is the external conflict that, finally, forces them to either break down the walls between them or they both die.

So. To be clear. Romance requires ONLY internal conflict. Without internal conflict, you don't actually have a romance story. This is fine, if you aren't writing romance. But if you want to sell a story as a romance, you can't pretend a few sex scenes between waves of rabid zombies attacking equals a romance. It doesn't. Your hero and heroine have to have a reason they cannot possibly love one another. Then they have to proceed to get past that (or not - if you like tragedies). Use your external conflict to force them to get past their 'you are the last person on earth' protests.

As a note: I'd once been told that in a romance, you should resolve your external conflict (kill the bad guy) first, and resolve the romantic conflict last. I've since seen some authors changing that up a bit. So take that bit of advice with a block of salt. If you're seeing feedback about 'where's the romance' or 'all external, no internal conflict', start here.

3. Put it in dialog. As much as possible, get out of a character's head and get him or her talking. If they think it, why can't they say it? If a hero says what he's thinking about heroine, you give your heroine a chance to respond verbally. That interchange will tell your readers far more about those two people than entire paragraphs of what they're thinking. Instead of Sam looking at Rene and thinking, "Whoa, she's cute!" Let him eye her, sidle up next to her, wondering what it was she was carrying over her shoulder and say, "What's a gorgeous gal like you doing in a post-apocalyptic dump like this?" Rene awards Sam a hard stare and drops the limp body of a dead man at his feet. Sam blinks down at the dead guy's wide open eyes. "Ditching the body of the last smart ass who tried to sweet talk me," Rene retorted.

Because humans are social animals, we're infinitely more fascinated by two people talking than we are by anyone thinking. Get the thoughts into dialog *especially* if they're remotely embarrassing or compromising! That's where the fun is. Let your characters out to play. You can always pull them back later.

If you're seeing feedback about 'too much exposition' or 'why are they thinking all this' start here.

Contest News

Change

Yes, the ubiquitous fall foliage shot. It's thematically correct. Really.

A friend, Jeffe Kennedy, updates her blog every single weekday. You'll notice I don't. We were chatting yesterday about a group blog we've both signed on for - the Word Whores. There are seven of us. We’ll each have a day of the week to post our musings. The group came up with a list of 52 topics for the year that we would each write to. Yeah, there's a story here regarding how all of this came about, but it's not mine to tell...this is Allison Pang's (as opposed to Frankenstein's) monster. That and I suspect the story of how the Word Whores got started will be part of our 1/1/11 kick off of the blogsite. More on that as events warrant.

Back to my envy of Jeffe's disciplined blog posting schedule. I'd made some comment that I'd get started writing my blog posts in advance so they could be scheduled to post automatically. That way, my chances of missing a posting were lower. Jeffe seemed surprised by that - she was just going to blog on her scheduled days as they happened and wasn't I disciplined to write my posts ahead of time.

I quickly disabused her of that notion, pointing to my sporadic updates of my own blog. I so envy people who seem to be able to arrange their lives in such a way that they can sit down every single day and actually pull words from their heads. My life defies that sort of thing. As soon as I say “Henceforth, I shall rise at this hour, sit my butt down in my office chair, and WRITE”, life replies “Oh yeah?” and throws some crisis into my path that requires I be someplace else at precisely the time I’d fenced off for work. Jeffe gently pointed out that if I wanted to be one of ‘those’ people who could sit down at a specific time each day to write, I had to be willing to disappoint my friends and loved ones by saying no some of the time. I had to get to a point, she suggested, wherein I could say I can’t do x – this is a work day for me. “It seems like some people just don’t consider writing serious work,” Jeffe noted.

Oh. Including me, apparently. If I took my own work and time seriously, I’d guard it. I began seeing how I’d created (and how I continue to contribute) to the problem. Okay. Issue identified. Now. To change…

Selection Pressure

If you required any further proof that I'm a hopeless geek (see previous post on the matter), I bring you the IM conversation I had on Tuesday with Jeffe Kennedy and KAK.

Me: You know. I never see anything about zombie dietary preferences. Do they like the brains of smart people better than the brains of less intelligent folk? Or are less intellectual brains sweeter because there's not so much stuff in there? And then, what sort of selection pressure would zombie predation put on homo sapiens? Would it select for intellect one way or the other?
kak: think the plaque build up on diseased brains makes 'em like rice-candy?
Me: LOL! EW!!! Crunchy!
Jeffe: I think plaque would be more chewy, actually
kak: hmm, chew toys for zombies
Me: Brain flavored nougat?
Jeffe Kennedy: and the glia has a decidedly different texture, where they're usually more like oatmeal, when alive. or jelly
Me: So if it maintains any shape outside the skull, it's gone bad?
kak: twizzlers, now in Brain flavor!
me: Assuming disease = bad
Jeffe: pretty much the brain only retains shape outside the skull if you've preserved it first. formalin for the win! so we always perfused and preserved brains before removing them #morethanyouwantedtoknow
Me: So that makes the whole notion of zombies as mindless sort of not work. They'd have to know that in order to get a meal of brains, they'd have to preserve the skull. Otherwise, they're scraping gray matter off available surfaces.

No. I don't remember how we got on this topic when ostensibly we were critiquing the first chapter of my third book. I wonder if that bodes ill for that book? I don't even particularly care for zombie movies, though if the World War Z movie is made and is half as good as the audiobook was, I'll be right there. Yes, okay. I'll confess a fondness for the first Resident Evil movie, but I'll maintain that's an infatuation with the soundtrack (and the "You're all going to die down here" Red Queen) as opposed to the whole zombie trope. I appreciate the social commentary that zombie stories represent. Regardless, it had never occurred to me that I might end up writing a zombie story. But I find the moment once I start asking questions that intrigue me, questions like 'what sort of selection pressure would zombie predation place on the human race' I'm doomed. I have to write about it. I have to play with the idea on paper. Or in pixals as the case may be. So how about it? Do you suppose zombies hunger indiscriminately for brains? Or are they capable of detecting and appreciating the nuances of texture and flavor that accummulated knowledge might represent and then hunting specifically for the brain type they crave? How does that impact the few human survivors and the dwindling generations that follow them? Don't be shy. This is for pseudo-science!

Spreading the Sailing Bug

Jeffe Kennedy and her SO, David, came to stay aboard the boat this past weekend. They wanted to see what this living aboard thing was all about. Maybe I'd failed to mention the word 'cramped'.  After David banged his head a few times on the cabin top (tall person aboard a boat = perpetually bruised forehead) I suspect they'd worked it out. Or maybe it after they'd spent a night in the barely a double, aft cabin. The trade off is that the photo at left is the view from our foredeck.

Jeffe swore to me she brought sun with her whenever she vacationed. She did not lie. For three days, the sun shown and the skies stayed blue. Neither Jeffe nor David had sailed before, so we cast off, raised sail and took them across the Sound to Poulsbo. The moment the sails were up, Keith turned the helm over to Jeffe, who eventually relinquished it to David. We wandered Front Street, which is lined with art galleries, shops, restaurants and bakeries. Poulsbo's heritage is Nordic. The first settlers chose Liberty Bay because it reminded them of the fjords where they'd once lived. We poked through shops, found a restaurant with a deck in the sun and sat baking ourselves while we ate too much. We spent the night and woke to find the wind had risen in the night. We cast off after breakfast and headed back to Seattle. Keith handed the wheel over to David the moment we cleared the boats at anchor. We never got to raise sail on the return trip. The wind had turned from the north and was blowing out of the south east. Had we been on a monohull, we could have sailed, but the catamaran needed a better angle off the wind than we had. So it was a quick motor across the Sound.

Yes. Two cats were seasick. One on the way to Poulsbo, one on the way back from Poulsbo. This is an improvement over both being sick both ways.

A boat set up for people to live on is always more cramped than a boat with no liveaboards. Take all of our stuff, add cats, two litterboxes, a suitcase, four adults and shake. All in something short of three hundred square feet. Did I mention the head had kind of stopped working? Yeah. That was special. Once we'd docked and tied up, Jeffe and David packed up, anxious, I think, to get to their hotel where they'd have a bed the could sit up in without risking a concussion. Or maybe it was to find a toilet that flushed. Which ever.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. I got to hang with friends and Keith got to infect someone else with the sailing bug. Oh yes. A successful weekend on all counts. David and Jeffe departed discussing the merits of purchasing their own sailing craft. Keith and I count our twisted way of life validated.