RealityBypass

Well I suppose it’s as good a time as any to talk about using romance/romantic relationships as part of your plots. I was reading on several blogs that if you have two characters of roughly the same age, single, and the opposite sex most of the readers will want them to “get together” or “hook up”. I don’t read much romance, but I do like to see characters find their partner, be it in crime, life, vampire hunting, or… captaining spaceships. It always makes for a good part of the overall plot. Anyway here are some possible ideas for romantic sub-plots:

1) The Triangle! (“Two men. One Woman. Trouble“) Or the other way around. This makes for instant conflict, and you can change it around as much as you want! Old rivals, old friends, current friends… it’s amazing the lengths people will go to win their true love. (Or just win the prize). These opens things up for exploring true love, or… warning readers against the dangers of loving the competition more than the person.

2) The Romeo-Juliet (“then I defy you, stars!“) Who doesn’t love a good tale of two people who are denied the right to be together. We all love and lose in this world, and so it’s easy to relate to this classic plot. Sometimes it’s nice to see, sometimes, that other folks really have it worse than we do.

3) The Byronic (“Everyone got what they wanted… except me. Even she is better off here than she would be in a lunatic asylum, but I have spent the last fifteen years in TORMENT!”) The newest entry into this would be Edward Cullen, the driven, but mysterious and tormented, protagonist of Twilight. The Byronic Hero is tall, dark and handsome, and definitely moody. He’s not your average well adjusted nice guy. In fact, many of them are outright mean… and certainly spend a lot of time brooding. And yet… they’re usually handsome, compelling and beneath that broody dangeorus exterior the right woman can turn them into a reluctant hero.

4) I hate you, no I love you! ( “I hate the way you talk to me, and the way you cut your hair. I hate the way you drive my car. I hate it when you stare. I hate your big dumb combat boots, and the way you read my mind. I hate you so much it makes me sick; it even makes me rhyme. I hate it, I hate the way you’re always right. I hate it when you lie. I hate it when you make me laugh, even worse when you make me cry. I hate it when you’re not around, and the fact that you didn’t call. But mostly I hate the way I don’t hate you. Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.”).  Yeah… two people who think they can’t stand eachother discover true love. This one is usually a good one for comedy!

5) Girl/Boy next door (“I love you… I love you so much. I always have.” ) This plot involves either realizing just why the character likes spending time with his childhood friend/sweetheart/ or recognizing that his true love is the person right under his nose. He’s so comfortable with his pal, he never realized he really loved her.

6) The Cinderella Story (“I kneel before you not as a prince, but as a man in love… But I would feel like a king if you, Danielle De Barbarac, would be my wife.”)  This is the typical “upward mobility” sort of story, the protagonist marries into wealth, privilege, fame… or what have you. Every little girl does want to be a Princess… we just all have our different definition of Princess. I think what the Cinderella story gives us is something more basic, we all want to feel like we’re special, unusual… that someone important will take notice and make us important (to them). And that person doesn’t just have to be rich, or famous, or wealthy… if they make you feel like life is a fairy tale.

There are tons more… but my challenge for you, readers. Name those quotes! Or name the types of stories/movies that fall into these plots. Don’t cheat… don’t… No! No Google! (At least /try/ first… )

~Kristen

Well I was racking my brain trying to think of any romance novels I’ve read, that would be categorized as primarily romance. This meant that 75% of the story had to be focused on the relationship between two people. I was stumped, as I’ve said before I tend to prefer my Mysteries and Adventures with just a touch of romance, rather than the other way around. For me… swashbuckling adventure or vanquishing monsters together /is/ romantic :D. Anyway… then it hit me, Imzadi by Peter David fits the bill. This is the story of two people who share a bond that will not break, the history of that bond, and a man who will risk everything and change time itself to save the woman he loves. Yes, this is a Star Trek novel, but you don’t need to be familiar with the characters in order to like and understand the story. The novel is basically a story about soul-mates wrapped up in a science-fiction package and traces how that bond lasts, even after passions cool. What’s good about this book is that the relationship is realistic, it has Ups and Downs and it both evolves and needs to be changed. This is not a book of Happily Ever After, so much as a book that explores many facets of a spiritual-soul-mate relationship. It also has good intrigue and adventure, as Riker has to battle alien interlopers in different periods of time to save his love and restore history to it’s proper course. Peter David has a good command of humor, and his characterization is delightful. The plot flows smoothly and the romance and adventure mingle well. (~Kristen)

Rating:
    Genre:  Science - Fiction/Romance
    Age: Adult/Teen
    Content: Sexual content
    Overall:  Buy or Borrow

From the Publisher
Years before they served together on board the U.S.S. Enterprise^TM, Commander William Riker and ship’s counselor Deanna Troi had a tempestuous love affair on her home planet of Betazed. Now, their passions have cooled and they serve together as friends. Yet the memories of that time linger and Riker and Troi remain Imzadi - a powerful Betazoid term that describes the enduring bond they still share.

During delicate negotiations with an aggressive race called the Sindareen Deanna Troi mysteriously falls ill and dies. But her death is only the beginning of the adventure for Commander Riker, an adventure that will take him across time, pit him against one of his closest friends, and force him to choose between Starfleet’s strictest rule and the one he calls Imzadi.

PS: The Guardian Of Forever comes from this episode in the original series, available to watch for free online: City on the Edge of Forever

Okay I have some book suggestions and some Real Life suggestions going along with the Valentines Week theme.

Suggestion 1) Read a classic “Romance”, which includes William Shakespeare and some of the great Rennaisance plays. Don’t get upset with the language, seriously… pick one up. I prefer his Tragic Romances, but his Comedies have some great moments too. It’s good to know where the great sonnets come from. Gothic Romance is another great choice.

My list: Little Women (Louisa May Alcott), Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Lady Susan, Love and Friendship. Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion (Jane Austin) Dracula (Stoker), Wuthering Heights (E Bronte), Shirley, The Professor, Jane Eyre (C Bronte), The Awakening (Kate Chopin), The Good Earth (Pearl S Buck, my mother loves this one), My Antonia (Willa Cather), The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald), Great Expectations,  A Tale of Two Cities, (Dickens) The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables (Victor Hugo), Daisy Miller (Henry James), The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux), Ivanhoe (Sir Walter Scott), East of Eden (Steinbeck), A Streetcar Named Desire (Tenesse Williams), Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell), North and South (John Jakes), The Time Traveller’s Wife (Niffeneger), The Scarlet Pimpernell (Orczy), Don Quixote de la Mancha (Cervantes). The Faerie Queen (Spenser), Middlemarch (George Eliot), Mrs. Dalloway (Virgina Woolf), Barriers Burned Away (E. P. Roe)

My favorites are italicized, I’ve not read some of the others. Not all of these have happy endings, and some have romantic ‘elements’ but it’s not the sole purpose of the book.

Suggestion 2) Pick a book off this list of “Top 100 Romance Novels” http://www.likesbooks.com/top100y2k.html

Suggestion 3) Buy Valentines Day cards, like when you were a kid, and bring them to work on Friday. Give them out to your co-workers. Remember, not everyone will /get/ something for Valentines, it is a holiday that isn’t as much fun as an adult as when you’re a little kid, for many people. Silly 5 dollars/box valentines cards may well brighten someone’s day. (Those lollypop ones are especially fun!) Or… get something with cartoon characters on it.

Suggestion 4) Send flowers to your loved one (even if you’re the woman… my grandpa has always complained how he never understands why men can’t get flowers… they’re pretty! who doesn’t like pretty). If you don’t have an S.O. send them to a friend, to your parents or to yourself. I used to buy myself flowers on occasion…until I discovered my cats like to eat them.

~Kristen

Ahh…tis Valentines week… For many people it’s a time for red hearts, chocolate and lurve.  For me it’s about chocolate and two sons under the age of twelve who have begged that we not be ‘gushy’ or ‘gross’, so my family is going to a Monster Truck Rally.  Take that Cupid!

This week look for commentary on romance as a story motivator, romance as a genre and commentary on what kinds of chocolate we like the best.  I’m personally a dark chocolate fan, though a good milk chocolate truffle isn’t such a bad thing either.

There will be a prize for one commenter at the end of the week, so come on over to our house and chat.  If you’re having problems commenting, which has happened a time or three, try using a different browser.  We’ve told blog.com about the trouble and we’ll see where it goes.

Today I’m pondering the subgenres of romance.  A visit to wikipedia gives me this list of romance subgenres:

Contemporary
Historical
Romantic suspense
Paranormal
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Time-Travel
Inspirational
Multicultural
Erotic

It seems like a pretty good list.  Further we find the definition of a romance novel as a novel which focuses primarily around two people as they develop romantic love and relationships with a “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending”.

What do you think gentle reader?  Have we missed major subcategories in this list?  Do romances have to end happily ever after to be a romance and not a tragedy?  How far should our protagonists go for love and is it really worth it?

More ponderings tomorrow.

~Jana

I had a Professor in college who pretty much said that all stories could be classed as Tragedies or Comedies, either there’s death at the end or a marriage. He joked that all of the modern romantic comedies of today follow the same pattern as the Shakespearean and Aristotelian comedies.

Boy meets Girl. Boy and Girl have some reason they’re kept seperate. Boy and Girl defeat barrier to love. Boy and girl get married, and the world is put back in order.

So that got me thinking about the idea of “it’s been done”. It’s so difficult to truly come up with an original idea, because most of the plots can boil down to very basic elements. So what is it that makes a story “that’s been done” interesting? Details.

You have the basic plot: Boy travels back in time, meets his parents. It’s happened in Sitcoms, movies, dramas and everything else. Back to the Future and Supernatural come to mind immediately as having used that very basic plot, but the results were completely different because of the back story of all the characters. So a writing challenge of the day, and one I’ll see if I can’t post up here in a week or two: write a story where a boy travels back in time and meets his parents, see where it takes you.

So last week I mentioned that I’d found myself a copy of Unfallen Dead by Mark Del Franco.  This week I finally dug into reading and finished the book in about five hours, devoured it really.  I was mad when I had to get on the road and drive because it meant no more reading and I didn’t have anyone riding with me whom I could badger to read out loud, so there’s an indication of what I thought of the book.

More formally though, this was a really fun read.  I’m enjoying seeing how Connor grows both in personality and power as he moves from book to book.  I’m amused to see this former big wig play boy with a five o’clock stubble for hair making his way through a system he once helped to create and enforce.  The lore of the Convergence world which Del Franco has created is fascinating and pulls on some of my favorite Fairy lore.  In particular I loved the exploration of TirNaNog and the presentation of ghosts in this Boston. 

One of the things Del Franco does really really well is create secondary characters and for as much as I like Connor Grey, I’m equally interested in Joe, Murdoch, Meryl, Bri and now Dylan.  Much like the Harry Dresden books Connor Grey is surrounded by people who are interesting in their own rights and their interactions with each other and with Connor are delightful to read.

Is it a perfect book…nope…there are some of the plot pieces which feel short and a few I figured out long before the pieces started coming together in the book, but all in all I had a wonderful experience and the problems didn’t push me out of the flow of the story.

There’s some violence and a little language, and very mild sex scene.  This one is definitely a buy right now!

~Jana

Today’s book review is Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris. In the Urban Fantasy realm most folks recognize Harris as the author of the Sookie Stackhouse Series. This is one of her newer series featuring psychic Harper Connelly. I really enjoyed the book, the mystery was engaging and also had enough twists and turns to keep me interested. What I particularly loved is the “low power” and “low supernatural” feel of this piece. Harper’s abilities are strange, she can sense dead bodies and see their silent spirits, but it’s little more than that. It reminds me of the comfortable old Mountain Legends of the South and it’s very easy to accept and believe. The locals reactions to her are about as mixed as you’d expect, a lot of folks really think she’s just a vulture preying on those in pain. Others want to believe, or believe without question depending on their backgrounds. The setting is good, as well. What I think isn’t quite as good in this series is the characterization, the brother Tolliver comes across fairly flat and typical and Harper is neurotic and difficult to really like, entirely. The relationship between Tolliver and Harper was… odd. I can’t say more than that, it’s hard to put a finger on how I felt on it. Overall, it’s a plot driven novel, but I definitely enjoyed it. (~K)

Rating:
    Genre:  Urban Fantasy
    Age: Adult/Teen
    Content: Mild language and mild sexual content
    Overall:  Buy or Borrow

From Publishers Weekly
Ever since Harper Connelly survived a zap from a lightning bolt, she’s been able to find dead people, a skill that makes the protagonist in the first installment of Harris’s new series a tad more bizarre than the mind-reading heroine of the author’s Sookie Stackhouse books (Dead as a Doornail, etc.). Harper travels to the Ozark town of Sarne, Ark., to find a missing teenage girl’s body, accompanied by her stepbrother, Tolliver, who acts as her manager and bodyguard and with whom she shares a thinly disguised physical attraction that they manage to keep at bay by engaging in casual sex with various partners. Finding the body takes no time at all, but leaving town afterward isn’t so easy. When Harper’s life is threatened and Tolliver ends up in jail on trumped-up charges, it quickly becomes apparent that something sinister is going on in Sarne. Harris delivers a knuckle-gnawing tale populated with well-developed, albeit edgy characters. A nifty puzzle toward the end will challenge the most jaded mystery buffs.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Okay there are lots of hazards to writing, both physical and emotional. What are these, you say? Well… putting your hard work out in front of people only to have it torn to itty bitty bits with “We don’t like the main character” and “This doesn’t make sense” and “He solves that too easy” and “This scene is boring…” Or the sea of rejection letters we all will get. You start to think you may never get published. Those are the emotional hazards. You can also end up so caught up in the “craft” that you forget to enjoy yourself, and remember why you like to write in the first place. I tend to get so worried about the process I lose the joy I had of just “creating” back when I was a kid.

The physical hazards, however, are my topic of the day. Of course there’s the carpal tunnel problem, and that little bump you get on your finger where your pencil rests. I always have dark smudges on my fingers, and on my cheeks when I forget to cap the pen before I put it over my ear.

But… the Attack of the Clawed Keyboard… is the worst writing hazard.

We all have seen (or have) those desks with their pull out keyboard trays and they have the perfect little space behind them that’s…hrm, maybe about half an inch wide. Mine has claws. Claws that shoot out and grab my fingers like something out of a horror movie!

Those claws /do/ belong to my cat, Yoda, but… boy does it scare me when I’m typing away and suddenly claws shoot out of the keyboard. The first time he did this I fell completely over backwards shrieking. I am convinced that danged cat was SMIRKING at me as he trotted out and stood on my chest.

I didn’t die though. But I think it was close!

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that I’m an urban fantasy fan.  I wouldn’t call myself a rabid fan, but I’m pretty close.  I like UF.  I like seeing it grow as a genre and poke at the boarders between the real and the fantastic.  So I like recommending UF authors and encouraging folks to read so they’ll keep writing therefore feeding my book addiction.  You can see this is all just one big circle which comes back to making me happy by giving me more stories to read, though I don’t think I’m the only one benefiting! 

Sooo…along those lines there are three authors with books quickly coming out, or already out there who I’m gonna put a plug in for today.  Others will follow cause it’s a busy release season for UF this year. 

First of all we talked a little about Mark Del Franco last week.  His book Unfallen Dead is the third in his Connor Grey Convergent world’s series.  I couldn’t find it at Boarders, but I did locate a copy in my local WalMart and it’s gone to the top of my tbr pile.  If you have ever had travel troubles you should stop by his livejournal, which talks a bit about the good and the bad of travel and shows people can sometimes surprise you.

Then we have the lovely Ilona Andrews.  I’ve been addicted to her Kate Daniel’s series from the beginning and I’m amazed at the talented husband wife team who writes them.  Magic Strikes is due for release at the end of March and I can’t wait.  To add to the cool the pair of them will be out to OpusFest March 13-15th. Here’s the announcement from her blog:

OpusFest is back! March 13 - 15, 2009 at Red Lion Hotel (I-70 and Quebec) Denver, CO.  Come meet Ilona and Gordon Andrews, Gil Bruvel, Stephen Segal, David Boop and many others.   Click for more information.

I sooo need to see if I can swing it to go. 

Last in this post, but certainly not least, Anton Strout is preparing for the release of his second Simon book, Deader Still on 2/24, which is THIS month!  YAY!  As part of the festivities he’s running a contest for help creating the best advertisement to draw attention to the book release.  Pop on over here and read all the details.

Sooo…
January - Unfallen Dead
February - Deader Still
March - Magic Strikes

Break out the hammer and the piggy bank!  It’s time to shop babee!

~Jana