RealityBypass

Today’s post isn’t really about books or writing, but it’s something on my mind. I recently went to a work/church retreat for a conference on leadership. The speaker’s name was Dan Webster (http://www.authenticleadershipinc.com/). As a whole, his message was that every leader needs to develop both moral integrity as well as competency and how a leader should live his public life like he lives his private life. He spoke about how every leader needs to continually learn in his field as well as continually evaluate, read and strive to increase his moral competency. According to Webster, the breakdown in today’s leadership comes from leaders who strive for great competency but neglect their morality because we tend to say that “why does it matter how I live my life if I get the job done?”

I found those comments very interesting, but one of the other things that stood out to me was his stories about mentors and human relationships. Most of them were anecdotes to illustrate how a leader needs to have a handle on all aspects of his life, but I found something more inspiring and profound beyond that.

Each successful mentorship, friendship and marriage he spoke of relied on words. Webster told how he always remembered to ask his wife, every week, “How are we doing? What can I do for you to help you? Have I upset you in any way?” What a wonderful habit and something we should adopt in all of our relationships. So often we decide to just ‘keep quiet’ or ‘let it go’ but frustrations can build in ways we don’t even realize!

He told another story of a parent writing a letter to a teacher to say simply “Thank you and you are appreciated.” I’m a teacher, and every time someone tells me ‘Hey thanks’, I tear up. The sad fact is that encouragement is very rare in this world, we seem to just assume the people around us will know what they mean to us.

But what I took from this conference was a reminder that it’s important to tell people how important they are to you. Don’t just say ‘Hey I love you’, but tell that person why. If you’re uncomfortable, write a letter! There’s a great power in words. Think of all those times you start to wonder “Am I really that important… does he/she really care? Do they think about me as often as I think about them?” We all think it, wouldn’t it be nice to hear the answer to those questions sometimes?

And finally, remember to ask sometimes, “Hey we doing okay? Is there something more I can do for you…”

~Kris

I’m a ‘character’ lover. What really intrigues me with a book, a series, a movie or a television show tends to be a great, unique and quirky character. I’ve also discovered I have a passion for the ‘anti hero’ or the noble villian (provided, of course, they don’t spend all their time whining! No Pips or Viktor Frankensteins need apply!). I love Moriarty as much as I adore poor lonely Sherlock Holmes. So today I thought I’d focus on some of my literary hearthrobs for those of you ladies looking for a good adventure and a dashing gentleman to spend it with!

So here’s a few that come to mind randomly from books I’m reading or have read…

• Radcliffe Emerson (Amelia Peabody Series) Radcliffe, or the “Father of Curses” is a bear of a man, dashing, passionate, utterly devoted to his wife and prone to pouts when he doesn’t quite get his way. He treats his wife like an equal (when she’s not in danger or in need of saving, of course). His tirades are as equally endearing as his clumsy but heartfelt compliments for his wife.
• Ramses Emerson (Amelia Peabody Series): Emerson and Amelia’s son. He’s swarthy, handsome, utterly devoted to his true love, Nefret, honorable but he has a darker side. He’s an excellent spy and has a penchant for getting in trouble and a nature more brooding than his ebullient father. Ramses is my personal favorite.
• Sethos (Amelia Peabody Series): The ‘Villian’ of the series, or the Master Criminal. He has a talent for disguise, a sense of nobility even in his thieving and a flair for the dramatic. He pays Amelia elaborate compliments as he tries to steal her affections for the ‘dark side’ of archaeology. I love Sethos’s mysterious entries into the story and his dashing rescues of Amelia, which happen as often as he comes into conflict with the Emersons.
• Murray (VI Warshawski Series): Murray is your typical hard boiled reporter, fast talking and always out for the next big ’scoop’. I adore how he calles Vic “She who must be obeyed” and his irreverant loyalty to her. He’s always ready to bend the rules to help Vic solve a crime.
• Colonel Joshua Chamberlain (Killer Angels): He’s a poet, a hero, a warrior, and a scholar which I immediatley love. He gives us a lot of intellectual commentary on the war, and we see his real suffering as he watches men under his command die. We also truly feel his loyalty for his wife, and how he depends on her esteem and advice in his life.
• Jean Claude (Anita Blake series): JC is always my favorite of Anita Blake’s characters. I stopped reading her series after about book 8, when the focus turned from storytelling to sex but up to then I enjoyed the series. Jean Claude is arrogant, knows what he wants out of life, powerful and dashing and handsome. He knows how to be equally charming or terrifying, which pushes him sometimes to the side of villian. He has his own sense of honor, even if it doesn’t quite match the heroine’s. JC is fun for a dark hero, or a lighter villian.
• Numair Salmalin (Wild Magic): Numair is your typical absent-minded wizard with a heart of gold. He’s one of the only Black Robe Mages in the world so he’s also powerful, but since he fled his country and had to live impoverished he’s humble as well. Numair is protective and loyal, and one of the best scenes in the series is when he uses a ‘word of power’ to protect Daine from certain death.
• Don Quixote (Alonso Quijana): Don Quixote is a very romantic figure, who sallies forth into the world to right wrongs, win acclaim for his honored lady and battle evil. He’s irrepresibly optimistic and you begin cheering for him, even in his misguided attempts to see the world through romantic glasses.
• Harry Dresden (Dresden Files): Harry is cynical, chivalrous to a fault, accident prone and perpetually battling evil. I like how Harry does occasionally drift from the noble hero to some dabbling in the darker side of magic and the personality. Harry has a touch of danger always surrounding him, but he tempers it with being committed to the ‘good guy’s team’.
• Cyrano de Bergerac: Ah Cyrano… one of the greatest examples of French romantic writing. Cyrano is intelligent, charismatic, witty, romantic and debonair. He’s also an excellent swordsman and a noble soldier. But alas, poor Cyrano was born with an incredibly long nose, and so he has difficulty earning the affections of women. He tragically agrees to help another man, who lacks his abilities in wit, to woo the woman he loves…

~ Kris

We all, as writers and readers, will end up critiquing someone else’s work. As writers we expect we’re going to get rejection, or people flat just aren’t going to like stuff we did. In fact, we should expect it. I am happy to hear negative and positive comments. I do think, however, that if you want any rejection or criticism to be handled with grace it’s important to include positive with the negative. (And most importantly, START with the positive. If you start negative, they’ll stop listening to you.)

The hardest thing about the ‘rejection’ of Whisper’s last chapters was the bombardment of negative. (Well that and the fact that handing off the last pages, instead of getting a congratulations on finishing it, we got a list of how bad or uninteresting it was!) We were expecting some reaction to the deaths, some reaction to the peril of the characters. Instead, we got a list of all the things wrong and all the reasons the characters shouldn’t have done this.

Even worse were indifferent reactions. The response to one question was “meh”, which I think I’d rather have heard “I hated it.” The absolute enemy of a writer is an indifferent reaction. The ‘meh’ would have been a lot better accepted, with ‘I just couldn’t get into that character’s mindset” or anything to clarify what you might have needed for more reaction.

So my advice would be this, mingle the good with the bad. If you really dislike things, say so, but make sure you also include worthwhile points you liked or include suggestions of what you might have been expecting or wanting. Don’t just say, “I really hated that this character begged.” Better to say “I really think this character would argue, but she’d never beg. I think this because…”

Finally, if you’re sick, in a bad mood, ill or otherwise didn’t read a piece thoroughly tell your fellow writers this. I personally recommend not critiquing something when in a bad mood, your own work or someone else’s. Minor things turn major with that!

But ultimately, be honest.

~ Kris

Rejection.  It’s a harsh issue for just about anyone, but for folks pursuing a career, even a modest one, in any creative art it strikes even closer to home.  Writers create worlds and characters that they fall absolutely in love with and put them out into the public eye and then hold their breath and wait.  Wait to see if they will be loved or hated, cherished or rejected.

And that’s assuming you make it through the editorial process and still cling to your sanity.

The first harsh blow of rejection for Whispers happened last night.  It’s done.  We’ve penned the last word and completed the story.  Some folks have survived, some haven’t, everyone is changed for the experience.  Yeah, there’s still polishing to do, rough edges to knock off, but the first form is there…completed.  Seven years in the making.

Our writer’s group panned the ending…hard.  It’s kinda like being punched in the gut, particularly when you weren’t ready for it.  There’s a moment of shock followed by a lot of going, ‘buh, buh, buh…’  And then the grace comes in and you take the criticism as well as possible and begin to think.  What needs to change…what doesn’t need to change…and confidence returns…

 Usually after about half a gallon of ice cream and chocolate cookies…

~J 

I chose the Kris Longknife series by Mike Shepherd. The plot had good promise. Kris is the daughter of a wealthy political family on the planet Wardhaven who rebelled against her parents by joining the military, something a respectable daughter doesn’t do. In the meantime, Kris is having to prove herself truly dedicated to the military while also avoiding multiple assasination attempts. As the plot goes on, the ‘Society of Humanity’ also is on the brink of breaking up into Civil War with the outer colonies fighting against Earth and the inner colonies.

Unfortunately, the character development was thin and cliched, at best. The plot was slow to get into and you were left with a sense of ‘yeah right’ as Kris, a green Ensign, manages to out think her commanders, outfly a computer and outwit a group of criminals who had managed to defy several teams of planetary police. In the meantime, the action of the rescue is jarred by flashbacks to Kris losing her brother to a kidnapper many years previously. Unfortunately, the emotion is so thin that it’s difficult to feel compassion for Kris and the flashbacks start seeming trite and contrived to justify the heroines mental vacilations over rescuing the girl. The ‘rich kid rebelling’ theme is done to death, with commanding officers, politicians and even university students in a bar deciding to ’shun’ Kris because she’s a ‘Longknife’. They constantly force her to prove herself, even though her family has a very long military history.

Kris’s family is enough to make me scream. She has grandparents who she has to nearly break laws to visit, parents who are barely friendly and she describes her family as essentially a political battlefield. You have a tough time understanding why Kris would ever even bother to SPEAK to her parents.On good points, about halfway through the book the plot manages to pick up. I enjoyed the plot itself after Kris gets sent to a planet where she has to help with relief. Kris still manages to ’save the day’ and show up everyone around her, but I was able to accept the idea more because her commanding officers had been assigned there mostly as punishment for screwing up or lackluster work, so their lack of efficiency was believable.

The book allows for some reconciliation between Kris and a couple of her family members, but for the most part the characterization is fairly static. The main thing Kris learns is how to take responsibility for how her decisions affect others lives, but personally and professionally she starts out a Super Soldier and ends a Super Soldier.

Shepherd’s plot managed to save the book, but his characterization and the emotional depth of his characters is thin, at best. I didn’t mind the read, and I’m glad I forced myself through the first half but I’m not sure I’ll be picking up any others of the series.

~Kris

It’s said, pretty much universally by the nebulous group known as ‘them’, that the best writers are also the best readers.  There are no exact numbers as to how many books one should read, but most guidelines suggest reading a lot and reading both in your particular genre and outside of it.

This week I picked up Burning Water, by Mercedes Lackey.  This is one of her Dianna Tregarde series, released in 1989.  It was a fairly fast read and definitely had some good ideas.  I was intrigued by her use of religion in the series.  Very often religion in Urban Fantasy is either not mentioned at all, or religated to the role of something that is restrictive and negative.  In Burning Water various religions and religious cerimonies are mentioned all with respect and with open thinking.  I was also fairly fond of her use of description, she built a very tactile world that was easy to sink into.

Some of the less good ideas.   The fashion choices of the heroine dated the book badly.  Wearing leotards and jeans is something that only a few people did in the 80s, so the description pulled me quickly out of the flow of the story.  I was trying to picture the heroine and kept flashing to the idea that wearing a leotard would mean that she had to strip to the skin every time she visited the restroom.  It may seem like a silly detail to take issue with, but how many times is it something seemingly minor that pulls a reader out of the suspension of disbelief and right back into the real world.  As well the plotline was very predictable, and by the time I was halfway through the book I knew the ending.  I don’t mind having an inkling of how a book is going to end, that’s a sign of good foreshadowing, but the process of getting there should be interesting enough that it’s worth the read.

All in all I’m not sorry I read Burning Water, but would prolly give it a 3 on a five point scale.

 More musing when I’ve had a little less cold medicine.

 ~J

Well I wasn’t sure what to write about today, I just knew that I was tired of grading endless tests and exams! Working on a blog or another part of the book is definitely more fun than red-marking exams.

A little history: Ben and Dianna first met in 2001 in a PBEM, ie Play By Email game called Hunters - London. (I believe Dianna was actually created in 1999 or earlier!). We never intended them to be written together, Dianna had been ‘involved’ with another hunter character who had vanished. Somehow, though, their backgrounds meshed beautifully and a great love and adventure story started to form. New characters started to form and make cameos in the game, from the womanizing and irrepresible Emile Bergsson to the creepier villians: David, Daniel and Tilgwyn. Remington was born some time later as the Moriarty, honorable villian, to the Hunters and Ben. It wasn’t long before we realized that we’d created enough characters and history for our own novel, and so here we are today. (By the way, you can ‘meet’ Ben Taney and Dianna McDunna as characters on City of Heroes, Champion server! It’s terribly amusing to see them coming to life! I haven’t made an Emile or Remington yet, maybe one day!)

The Future:

These are some of the upcoming plots or ideas chasing around Jana’s and my heads. Caveat Emptor, these are brainstormed ideas… subject to change in the writing!

Shadiyah and Asima al - Sudairi are our werewolf characters, although their setting is still to be determined. We’re looking at pitting their own very non-technological upbringing against the technological world they find themselves in. Shadi and Asima were raised in a desert nomadic culture, although we haven’t quite decided if we want them from a parallel reality, an Earth Colony that has rejected technology or a country on Earth itself that has rejected the modern existence. They are warrior women, born to defend the weak and helpless from opression, although they’re going to have to learn how to adapt to an alien world as well.

My own short stories:

I’ve had an idea chasing about my head for sci-fi short story set on an underwater colony, where humanity has expanded to living under the ocean as well as above. I haven’t moved much further, but I do think that in this society religion has been outlawed, which means many preachers and priests have relocated to the underwater frontier.

Other ideas forthcoming.

~Kris

“El hombre quiere ser pájaro y pez, el perro es un león desorientado, pero el gato es solo gato…” Pablo Neruda

I think one of the best lessons I’ve learned about writing recently is that it has to be treated like a job. I used to write on a few short stories when a character or event struck me as interesting, and then I’d put it aside and when I came back to it I’d forgotten exactly what was interesting or where I was going. As a result I have plenty of half-finished short stories growing dusty in the depths of my computer’s hard drive that may never be finished.

I used to blame ‘writer’s block’ for not finishing my stories, but the truth was it was ‘writer’s lazyness’. One day of “I can do this tommorow” would turn into two, and two would turn into six and six would turn into a couple weeks. Then, by the time I was ready to work on it again the flow was gone.

So yes, writing is a lot of fun! But it’s also a lot of work! Just because the words don’t just flow onto the paper like a torrent the moment you sit down doesn’t mean you’re blocked, it means you need to just get started.

In the movie “Finding Forrester” the main character tells his young protege “The enemy of the writer is the blank page. Just write. It doesn’t have to mean anything, just type anything at all and eventually your own words will start coming.” This works for me, even when I end up re-writing the first paragraph half a dozen times, the act of just putting words to paper defeats writer’s block every time.

By the way, rent Finding Forrester, it’s an awesome writer’s movie. (Or a teacher’s movie for that matter!)

Some tips:

• Turn on music that provokes emotions for you (keep the TV off).
• Resist the urge to multi-task. Multi-tasking doesn’t mean more efficiency, it means less focus. (Those dirty dishes can wait!)
• Give yourself at least an hour and a half of uniterrupted time to write. (Shut the door, turn off the phone and tell friends you will have time for them in an hour!)
• Don’t stress out about ‘how it’s said’ in the first draft, just get it down on paper. There’s plenty of time for rewriting and refining later!
• Workevery day or every other day. (Never go more than 3 days, you’ll spend a lot of time rereading for the flow! This is not to say you can’t take vacations, but best not to do it in the middle of a work!)
• Above all, enjoy what you’re writing and don’t be afraid to let the characters go off on their own tangents. Mine do all the time!

~Kris

“En mi verso estoy libre”