​When I’m a Writer I’ll…
 
By Amy Lane
 
Oh yes—we all have an image of that thing we want to be when we grow up, right? When I was getting my degree, I thought teaching would be me, elegant and coiffed, smiling benevolently as I dispersed the magic of the literary gods to the willing masses.
 
I had no idea I’d spend most of my career wearing jeans and a T-shirt, saying things like, “If you’re going to pass me a phony excuse note, dorkweed, try to hide the fresh hickey on your neck when you come in!”
 
But that’s okay—because the things I did get from teaching were infinitely better than the image I had of what it would be like,
 
But that doesn’t mean the image wasn’t fun.
 
So here’s a list of things we absolutely need to be good writers. Must haves. Can’t write without them. Everyone’s got ‘em.
 
Swear.
 
A Writer’s Clothes
 
A true writer wears some if not all of the following:
 

• Shawls of many colors or a shawl collared sweater
• Folksy peasant shirts when gardening (see a Writer’s Hobbies)
• Yoga pants
• Corduroy jackets with leather patches at the elbows
• Unspeakably ugly ponchos
• Housedresses in fashion in the 50s
• Faded jeans
• Baseball T-shirts featuring 80’s bands emblazoned on the front
• Gauzy layers of brightly colored confectionary clothing
• Turbans or Fedoras
• Long coats
• Ascot ties
• Cocktail dresses of severest black
• Black jeans, sweatshirts, and berets
• Feathers, somewhere

 
Pastimes
 
We can’t always be sitting at the manual Underwood typewriter conjuring worlds out of thin air—we must have other pastimes that underscore how brilliant we are and how sad it is that we can’t crouch, cramped and feral, over a relic of a bygone age, for all eternity. A real writer can be found--
 

• Gardening
• Attending cocktail parties given by the prominent members of his or her community (See Vices)
• Solving crimes for fun!
• Volunteering at orphanages
• Learning new recipes
• Sampling wines (See Vices)
• Jetting to New York to talk to our agents
• Starting new businesses with our friends
• Reading, uninterrupted, in a book filled corner of our home while the maid brings us a sandwich and a brandy
• Fighting violently with our lovers
• Lounging about in coffeehouses, critiquing the world and contemplating the decline of civilization as we know it as evidenced by the lack of ferocity in the Oxford comma debate

 
Beverages
 
The following is a partial list of things that a writer should consume at some point in his or her career:
 

• Absinthe
• Whiskey
• Single Malt Scotch
• Sauvignon Blanc and other wines that do not taste like flat seven up
• Coffee, black
• Coffee, regular
• Coffee, on ice, with an exotic essence of something not unhealthy for you wafting off the surface like perfume
• Red Bull and Gin
• Ale
• Perrier
• Microbrews
• Vodka Martinis
• Tea—particularly peppermint, chamomile, Earl Grey or chai
• Mint Juleps
• Vodka Lemonades
• Greyhounds
• Long Island Iced Tea
• See Writer’s Vices

 
 
 
 
Accessories
 
Some very potential accessories to a writer’s image are--
 

• A scarf, ala Doctor Who
• A pipe
• A genteel cigarette
• A large cat
• A small dog
• A large dog
• A dying plant
• A backyard that resembles the jungles of the Amazon
• Books, falling off the bookshelves
• A kitchen table that looks like the ruins of Pompeii
• Tax troubles
• Missed deadlines
• Glamorous friends
• Misanthropy
• Reclusiveness
• A dripping sense of irony
• A distant relationship with time
• An even more distant relationship with the Chicago Manual of Style
• A general disdain for rules or distractions or basic manners
• An a leaky pen, manual typewriter, or, in a pinch, a Neolithic computer
• Accoutrements of exercise—often dusty
• A miserable day job
• An interesting vice

 
Writer’s Vices
 
Now, it’s true—most of the writers I know are actually well adjusted people who eat well and exercise as often as their lives permit…
 
However, the great writers of the literary canon had some, shall we say, interesting vices, things that our coworkers in the carpool or the other parents of our kids’ soccer teams just don’t indulge in.  So, of course, no matter how mundane a real writer’s life might be, we can’t help but yearn nostalgically for the glamour and enchantment of the old school vices.  We don’t actually want the vices, per se—but, you know, we sometimes fear that we’ll never be Dickens if we’re not writing from debtor’s prison with our impoverished family by our side.
 
Some other vices include--
 

• A fondness for older women—if we’re heterosexual men
• A fondness for younger men—if we’re heterosexual women
• Vice versa if hetero is off the table
• Repressed homosexuality—if we’re men writing about being manly men who don’t like women because we do not lust after men
• Laudanum addiction—particularly if we’re Romantic poets
• Money troubles—particularly if we have older richer relatives who wish to chain us to a respectable job during a time when only men could inherit
• Sexual insatiability—particularly if we’re Victorian novelists, Romantic poets, or pulp fiction writers in the 70’s
• Controlling disapproving parents—if we’re young women in the 1800’ds
• Alcohol—particularly Southern writers in the 30’s
• Alcohol—particularly white male writers in any age
• Alcohol—particularly during prohibition
• Alcohol—particularly if you have a missed deadline, a convention to attend, a book that didn’t sell, or an editor/publisher/critic who just doesn’t understand
• A spouse who resents your success and sucks the creativity right out of you—especially if you’re F. Scott Fitzgerald—also, alcohol
• A laundry list of ex-spouses to support
• A laundry list of children who hate you
• Heroin—particularly if you’re a Beat Poet in the 50’s
• Too many cats

 
And there you go—all the things you need in life to be a writer, except, you know, the finished manuscript and the contract.
 
Go forth, writer, indulge in some vices, buy a shawl, shoot back some whiskey, pet your cat and create!
 
 
 
 
 
 

Tis the Season
 
By Amy Lane
 
 
So, the holidays are coming and all of our favorite authors have a holiday release coming out—HUZZAH!
 
There is something irresistible about the winter solstice holidays and romance. It’s like the requirements of good will and gift giving make it possible to violate all of the rules of reality in a quest for a happy ending. Even your angstiest author abandons the gritty romance of a dangerous street for a gentler, kinder romance, one in which the outcome is never really in doubt.
 
Seriously—no self-respecting romance writer would dare release a romance with a questionable ending at this time of year, and if he or she does? The consequences are dire. (Ask me how I know—see The Bells of Times Square, released December of 2014.  Uh-huh.) 
 
This season can be a lot of fun in terms of books. The happy romance reader gets to go out and buy something light and fluffy, or poignant and sweet. Something that offers a panacea to shopping panic and a brief, happy sequester from family quarrels and strife that can sometimes overwhelm us during the holidays.  It’s a good feeling—I know I’m not immune, as a reader. I want that happy, sappy, weepy, chocolaty yum piece for my December and January, and oh yes, I have a few authors that never fail to deliver.
 
Of course, for your happy romance writer, it’s time to write something sweltering in August—for, say, a ten-month lead time, or skippy in May for the seven or twenty-month crowds, or maybe a Valentine’s piece for a fifteen month timeline.
 
The fact is, romance writers are never writing during the time that they’re living—and that can be either a hindrance or a help to the writing process as a whole.
 
It’s a help when you’re desperate to escape the time you’re in, or when you’re eager to revisit the joy of the holidays. Some people slip easily into their Winter Solstice Slippers during the rest of the year, and that makes writing a breeze. Huzzah! They get to relive December, and that’s jolly good fun!
 
However, that jolly good fun thing isn’t for everybody. When the sun is sweltering down in May and you’re still paying off your Christmas bills and your entire state is either a hot wool blanket or a dust bowl in a blender, thinking about the holiday season might be a little bit difficult. If you’re writing your holiday story in February, when you’re craving any spot of sun and the bright cold of December just seems like the precursor that doomed you to a damp and frigid death, it might be even worse.  These are times when a writer might need some help recreating Christmas cheer.
 
Some suggestions that might help--
 

• Reading the solstice letters you wrote and sent out over the seasons. I’m lucky in that January 3rd is the latest I’ve ever sent a batch out (I have the blog post to prove it!) so these are all seasonally themed.  They can help you remember things like concert and dance appearances, what your kids are doing that time of year, and what shopping was like in December—all of which help build holiday mood.
• If you blog, go back in your archives and read the posts you put out in November/December, and even the beginning of January. Those also have pictures of family in them for me, so that really gets the holiday happy going.
• Which brings me to holiday pictures of family. Yes. Use them shamelessly. Again, you are trying to recreate a smell, a mood, an ineffable feeling. If you have a family that has loved and celebrated a winter solstice holiday, then looking at those pictures might take you right where you need to be.
• A long sit down in a walk-in freezer. Okay—I’ll admit, I’ve never actually done this, but I’m serious, when it’s July and I’m working on a deadline and it’s 85 F in my house, I’ve wondered if I could talk my local food joint into letting me do just that. Mostly I’ve had to settle for a trip to the grocery store and sticking my head in the ice cream freezer, but still. It’s a nice break. Which brings me to…
• Cooking some solstice celebration and food. Not the whole turkey and the works, no—but some cranberry sauce and a baked potato with gravy, or a pumpkin spiced iced tea might get the holiday juices flowing.
• Music!  Of course, in my house, Christmas/Solstice music is strictly verboten until after Thanksgiving, but be assured, I would TOTALLY hit that playlist if I was having problem writing Yuletide Greetings in late May!
• Cleaning out the garage or winter wear drawers. Now, I’ll admit, I don’t actually do this last one, but I’m sure for some of you people with organized lives, this will be a real help. Tell me all about it, yes?

 
So there you go—some suggestions for conjuring up Christmas (or Feast Day, or Yule, or Hanukah) in July. Or May. Or February. Or, you know, whenever you’re writing your winter solstice themed story when it’s not winter solstice time!
 
And as for those of us writing our hot and sweaty romances now? When cargo shorts, flip-flops and a tank shirt would damage some of the bits many romance writers and readers love best?
 
Well, there’s always shotgunning episodes of Hawaii 5-0, Lost, or Breaking Bad. (Not that Breaking Bad will actually put you in a romantic mood, but it did have “sweaty desert” down to a science.)  If that fails, there’s cranking your heater up and lounging about in your summer wear, or visiting your gym and taking advantage of the sauna. There are some amazing calendars featuring beautiful and exotic summer lands—those could help too!
 
Or—and this is the best one, the one that should be used by all romance writers ever in order to convince their spouses of the perfect present—you could convince your spouse that a vacation in Hawaii or the Caribbean would be a perfect gift for you, especially because you’re writing something in that setting, and you could really use the research.
 
That’s right. Research.
 
So I think, this March, when I’ll be writing one of the first of my Christmas stories for next year, I will bake myself some fudge and make turkey and potatoes for dinner.
 
And tell my family that it’s research.
 
They’ll love research!
 
 
 

Amy’s Lane: November, 2015
Sea Changes
 
By Amy Lane
 
We had to ask it eventually.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed. DOMA was repealed and marriage equality was granted.  Let’s face it—for gay romance writers, the landscape has changed. Gone are the days when just being gay was a conflict, and when “this strange feeling in a young man’s loins when looking at his best friend” was a passport to a bewildering new world. 

The average age of coming out is now fourteen—parenting blogs are full of tips for parents to make their gay or trans children feel accepted and loved, and the kids themselves are hyperaware.  In fact, should children be unsure of where they fit in the rainbow? There is always the Internet. Any curious young man or woman can go on tumblr these days and open a box full of dicks (or breasts for that matter), and kids are continuing to invent electronic ways with which to not feel alone anymore.

 In terms of acceptance, at least on the legal front in America, things are better.  Unless a couple is planning to take a trip to Russia, India, or one of the countries being heavily proselytized by the venomous right--being gay is no longer a crime.

So now that what do we write about in contemporary American gay romance?

Well, hopefully, the same thing we’ve been writing about since the beginning.

Romance.

I know it’s tempting to think that gay romance was just a fad.  I’m sure some people believe the allure of the forbidden combined with the idea of two star-crossed lovers versus the world to create the ultimate guilty reading pleasure.  Oh no! Is that the extent of the writing career of so many? Are we strawberries and chocolate no more?

Well, I don’t think so.

But then, I’ve never really wanted to write stories about just being gay anyway. 

I mean, het romance authors don’t write stories just about boy meets girl and sex ensues. Their stories have plotlines and character development and crises—just like ours do. And nobody is afraid the het market is going to go belly up—as long as people yearn to fall in love and start a family of two (or more!) the romance market is going to just fine thank you.

The fact is, although sexuality is part of what defines us, it is by no means all that defines us—and so it should, by no means, define all of what our genre contains.

But it is true that romance follows the times.

When I was a teenager, back in the eighties, the romances were all about the young, bewildered ingénue being inducted into the world of love by a sophisticated older man who could rescue her from her poverty and her inconvenient maidenhead, all in one magic meeting of cooter and peen.

By the time I was in college, the stories were all about the women who had divorced the controlling cradle robbers they’d married in their youth, and who could marry the boy next door while single-handedly raising their adorable children.

Ten years later, the women were the CEO’s of their own companies, and they had to decide if their assistants were fair game or not—and if they wanted a family, with all they had on their plates.
And the world spins on, and the contemporary romance continues to change.

Six years ago, when I was writing Keeping Promise Rock, Crick could have come out in the army and taken a dishonorable discharge. He chose not to because the moral upbringing he’d received from Parrish Winters stuck. He kept his promises if at all possible.

That option would not be around today. Crick wouldn’t have had to hide his sexuality, and his alienation in boot camp and in the Middle East would not have been so acute, and his moment of infidelity would probably have never happened. In that sense, it would have been a different book.

But Deacon would still have been the shy loner trying to carry his sadness in a bottle of alcohol. Benny still would have been angry and pissed off and pregnant. The levee still would have broke, Comet still would have died, and Deacon probably would still have woken up next to a woman he hardly liked wondering what in the hell he’d done.

Because those are things that just don’t change.  Those are the elements of being human that not a government in the world can legislate, and Deacon Winters probably knew that before a small boy climbed the fence at the horse arena and watched him work a stallion.

So the majority of Keeping Promise Rock would probably be exactly as it is now—but some parts would not, and those are the parts that everybody in our genre needs to think about as this genre continues to grow.  If we were writing for a world where sexuality was not the end all and be all of our characters—yes, even in a romance book—then odds are our prose and our plotlines are going to develop just fine topically.

But what if that has been your writing mainstay for the last few years? What if—for you as a writer—the “gay against the world” trope was the only trope you had going for you.

Well, the best way to expand your repertoire is to go outside your box—and the next biggest sized box up is the box of books that has sold with stunning regularity and volume for the past hundred years.

Poppy Dennison, the driving force behind the Dreamspinner Press Dreamspun Desires category line, has a deep and abiding love of the tropes and archetypes that have driven romance since the very beginning.  She believes these are the same tropes and archetypes that, with a little bit of tweaking, have sustained the tradition and will push the genre into the 21st century.

“Some things in romance are timeless, and now that our community has a release from fear, I think they’re going to want to read more about the celebration. That’s where our genre is going to be successful—in the joy of romance and the promise of happiness that love has to offer.”

And why not? The same subgenres that have been outstandingly successful in the het world continue to be the bestsellers in gay romance as well. Romantic suspense, werewolves, cowboys—these twists on romance have been incredibly successful in both worlds thus far, and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change.

Amelia Vaughn, Marketing Director of Riptide Press, agrees. In a recent conversation, as I was blathering on about comic book archetypes and how one of the deciding draws of gay romance was the absolute clash of equals that having two men on the page represented, Amelia got incredibly excited about the genre.

“Absolutely! We are attracted to the pure personalities of the men—it’s not just two cocks on the page or the ‘oh no, I’m gay!’ story line that we’re reading for anymore. It’s the absolute respect that the two characters have for each other, coming into a relationship as equals, and how that reveals the weaknesses and strengths of each one.

Or, as my beloved publisher Elizabeth has been known to say, “Two guys, working shit out. That’s all we really want to see, just two guys, working shit out.”

It is, unsurprisingly, pretty much what het authors have been writing since the first Mills & Boone romance hit the presses—except they’ve been writing “Two people, working shit out.”  Which works just as well, if not better.

“But Amy!” I can hear you say. “Aren’t you the queen of angst? What are you going to write now?”

Well, I’ve actually written more than angst since almost the beginning—and especially in my fantasy work, the level of emotion, the propensity for pain, is not driven by the characters’ sexuality.  It’s driven by a cruel world at large coupled with most human beings’ ability to be absolutely horrible to one another and even worse to themselves. I’ll still be able to write angst—and so will anybody else who appreciates a chest-ripping weeper. 

It’s just that the source of the angst can’t come from the big bad government against our boys anymore—not in contemporary American romance. Yes, families are slow to come around, and it has been perfectly clear in recent years that no civil rights battle is ever truly won until all parties feel welcome in their own country. LGBTQ youth are still homeless at an increasing rate, and the more vocal our trans community becomes, the more we can see clearly how appallingly they’ve been treated since the very beginning. So the conflicts in the community are still there—but the way they’re shaping up, in our writing we’ll either need to keep them closer and more personal, or wider and further reaching in scope.  If we’ve been pushing the reality that all sexuality is positive and awesome, we can’t base our fiction on a “victimology” of being gay—and we never should have in the first place.

The fact is, if we’ve been writing in this genre with good intentions and a whole heart, we’ve been writing toward this exact day, when the world has opened up for our heroes and there is a whole host of other problems to address.  This genre has been used to address social change in such a positive way—why would that stop now?

Every year, when Elisa Rolle presents the Rainbow Awards for LGBTQ books, she gives a list of all of the charities people have donated to as they’ve submitted their books for consideration.  The recipients on that list include women’s shelters, suicide hotlines, and animal rescue—and the Rainbow Awards are just one example of the activism of the gay romance community.

In fact, the romance community as a whole has been deeply committed to seeing a better world. Perhaps it’s because we write about happily ever after, or perhaps it’s because writers as a whole are deeply empathetic, but it never ceases to amaze me that so many of us yearn to do so much good, whether it’s through our writing or our other endeavors.

That can still happen—and LGBTQ causes can still be on the top of our list.

But the world is opening up to a place with less fear and more hope—and just like we embraced the hope when things looked pretty bleak, it’s our job to celebrate the hope now that they’re looking better. And if we want to survive as writers—and as a genre—that’s going to be how we do it.
​
Our happy endings hopefully just got a lot happier—let’s see how bright we can write that future now!
 

Promises
 
By Amy Lane
 
I get them sometimes—on Keeping Promise Rock or Deep of the Sound in particular: reviews in which the reviewer doesn’t understand the central conflict of the story—because the central conflict of the story is a promise.

“Crick could have just told the army he was gay—that way he wouldn’t have had to serve!”

“I don’t get why Cal wouldn’t have sold his parents’ property for the money. Why wouldn’t you just cash in?”

The thing about these observations—the thing that many people do not get—is that when a character puts down their name on a contract, or gives his word to an elder, that means something very specific to a writer.

To a writer? That’s like a contract in blood. That’s the Little Mermaid inscribing her name on a magic document right there—you don’t even need lawyers for that shit, because the magic of that promise will shrivel her heart if she doesn’t come through.

Very few writers—and certainly not writers with a following—do not feel that a promise, even a promise made implicitly, is not a binding part of their soul.

There are a couple of reasons for this—some of them practical.

It’s common practice for writers to get an advance based on their first three chapters. That’s not how my publisher’s work, and I’m glad, because if someone dumped a shitton of money in my lap for a book I hadn’t written yet? Oh holy Jebus on a stress-cookie, I’d be a hot goddamned mess. I have enough problems when my editing goes close to the wire. My kids are late to school and we eat nothing but takeout if I’m even running near a “I told my publisher I’d probably have it done by—“ kind of moment. I have writer friends who live on coffee and tears for a week near a deadline, or who neglect to bathe until the stench drives them into the shower fully clothed. (No, that was not me. Maybe.)  Writers live and die by their, “Yeah, I can do that!” word, and I’m telling you, the pressure you find yourself under when that happens is enough to choke a goat. 

So yeah—from a strictly financial and professional standpoint, we take a promise seriously. But it’s more than that.

The, “Yeah, I can do that!” moment is nothing compared to the “Yes. I will do that, because my craft and audience demand it!” moment. Writers, you know what I’m talking about—I’m talking about the dreaded “Sequel Promise.”

Oh holy Goddess, do I know sequel angst.

A year ago, I’d say Forever Promised was my worst case of sequel angst. After interrupting the book twice for other projects, I just sat down and barreled through. It was hard. This was the last book in the series, dammit, and on the one hand, these characters and I had enjoyed a good run together and I was ready to see them all happy. On the other hand I didn’t want to say goodbye! Every damned word of that book was a piece of push-me-pull-you ripped out of my flesh, and still, e-mails, daily. “Is it done yet? Are you working on it? You’re not going to kill Deacon, are you?” (Not even tempted. That man deserved some frickin’ happy, I am not even kidding.) The end of writing that book was a four-day marathon in which I wrote 35,000 words.

You read that right.

35,000 words. (The book itself was nearly 130K, so, well, about a fifth of the book.) By the time I was done I had a bladder infection, pink eye (because I was sitting underneath dusty vents), and a chest cold. I crawled into bed at two in the morning, giggling and coughing and wondering when I’d have to pee again.
 
“You done?” my husband asked.

“Yep. Completely done.”

“Never again.”

“Not like that,” I promised—as in, I wasn’t going to compromise my health to that extent again. But not like I was never going to do that again. I couldn’t promise that. As a writer I knew it wasn’t realistic—we have to write sequels. Sometimes, just the first book—or the first four books in the series equals a promise, and that promise needs to be fulfilled if humanly possible. 

Sometimes it’s not. I just finished a book called Quickening--and it’s a book I never thought would be written.
My first series—the Little Goddess series—was originally self-published, in pretty much the worst way possible. The editing was shitacular, and for a while I was a walking amalgam of all of the worst ways for a writer to market her books. I learned (please, Goddess, let me have learned) and I was welcomed into the gay romance community with open arms—but my first M/M novel, Keeping Promise Rock, was released in exactly the same month as Rampant, the fourth book in the Little Goddess.

Promise Rock did really well. And at a time when I needed acceptance and props in the worst possible way, the M/M community was telling me, in no uncertain terms, that my writing was wanted and I was appreciated.
So I put off the fifth book in the series for a year. “I’ll write it!” I promised my readers cheerfully. “I’m just taking a year off to explore this other writing opportunity.”

During that year my teaching job was yanked out from under my feet, and suddenly writing was not just “a sideline”—it was about to become my sole source of income.

I had to look at things realistically—could I afford to write the fifth book in my urban fantasy series? I was supporting my family--I had made promises to them, as well, including things like keeping my house and providing as much as possible for college. I needed to choose my writing carefully, and the surer bet was gay romance.

I had to put Quickening off for another year. And another year. And another year.  But I’d promised.

Answering those fan mails and FB queries took on the quality of climbing uphill in a sand quarry. “I’ll write it, I swear, just as soon as I get out of this hole. Soon. Just as soon as… I’m working on it, I promise. I’ll write it—I will. I just need to get out of that hole!”

This January—five years after the fourth in the series debuted--I broke paper on the fifth book of the Little Goddess.  On the one hand, considering the almost six year gap between writing one book and the other, the work on this monster went incredibly fast. Especially considering I was adding on to a cumulative mass of world-building and side works that amounted to over a million words. I wrote 205,000 words in four months—while simultaneously re-editing the other books for re-release, and that sounds like I rocked the house. (This process is a whole other post—but I need to wait to see if I survive it.)

But on the other hand…

I was writing this book for an extended timeline—this book is going to be released in 2017. To put things in perspective, the short Christmas novel that I finished afterwards is going to be released in on December 24th of 2015.  On the one hand, it looks like I hauled ass—but on the other hand, I have a hole in my income stream gaping from early August to late December, and that gap pressed down in the middle of my chest for the entire four months. I would wake up, short of breath, thinking, Must. Write. Faster!  I had tearful, machine-gun-snot-sobbing conversations with my agent, my editor, my publisher, and my best friend about how I had to get this novel done. I woke up every morning, thinking I’m writing to HERE today. I have no choice if this book is going to progress.

And every time I opened an editing file from either one of my publishers I had to do breathing exercises so I didn’t hyperventilate.

I worried myself into two ulcerative colitis flares, and my children were afraid to ask what was for dinner.
I finished the goddamned book—but yes, for those months I fully felt the weight of keeping that promise.
Now, I can hear some of you calling bullshit—and I don’t blame you. Deadlines? We’re famous for breaking them, mostly because we’re always writing to them.  We can’t make every deadline, and if there’s anyone out there who’s never missed one? Well, he or she might be afraid to speak up for fear of being stoned to death with pens, pencils and USB drives.

 Sequels? Authors walk away from sequels all the time. Sometimes the pressure clams them up completely—they need to either write something else or find another line of work. Sometimes a publisher will deem the whole enterprise unproductive and simply kill the series. Sometimes what seemed to be an endless well of sequel bait dries up, because the author simply cannot imagine another HEA in a limited pool of characters. (This is particularly true in gay romance, I think. How many gay couples can there possibly be in a town of 10,000? Someone run statistics for me, I think most of us have violated those probabilities.)

But it’s never done lightly. It’s never done without those five-zillion conversations between you and your writer friends and your publisher and your editor and your fans and your agent and other people’s best friends and other people’s agents and other people’s editors and your parents and your spouse and your best friend and her husband and your kids and… oh God. Is there anyone you haven’t talked to that might help you justify breaking this potentially career destroying promise to spend four months to a year writing the thing that might—quite literally—kill you?

Because here’s the thing about authors and promises, and it seems reasonably simple but it’s not.
Promises are made of words.

For an author, our lives our made of words. Our lifeblood, our world, our reality, our love, our passion, our pain, our demise, is entirely scripted with words. A promise is something real to us, like a concrete wall is real. It’s real like a piece of glass is real, or a splintered board or a knife to the throat.  Yeah, we violate deadlines and we walk away from sequels, but it’s like crashing through the side of our house, breaking through a chunk of the world or crawling through a bug infested culvert. 

Think about it—I chose the feeling of a five-month income gap pressing on my chest to get out of the terror of being buried alive under a gravel quarry. I chose pink-eye and a bladder infection and bronchitis over putting off finishing that sequel even one more week.

Every writer I know—and I do mean every one—who has ever made a promise to readers, to publishers, to agents, to printers, has some sort of battle scar to show for it.

Broken deadlines or lapsed sequels or not—promises are real to us. When Quickening comes out, that’s going to be the end of a seven-year commitment to the readers who put up with me through crappy punctuation and sheer desperation, and if I’m lucky? If I’m really really really lucky? The biggest reward I’m going to get from that book is that a whole bunch of people are going to ask me when the next one comes out.

And even I know it’s not good enough. That’s a dramatic example of the kept promise—to make up for the insidious gnawing privation of the broken ones.

And that’s why characters like Cal and Crick and Deacon. That’s why we’ll never quit writing about promises made, broken, and kept.

Because words are real to us. Our characters are made out of our words. And we may not be able to keep all our promises—frequently we’re haunted by the ones that will never see fruition.

But our characters are better than we are. They are smarter, they are stronger, they are the people we wish we were. Our characters will keep the promises we can’t. Our characters will make the impossible sacrifices for family when sometimes we need to hide from our family to stay sane. Our characters will make the noble choice to live with integrity instead of money when the very act of selling our artwork demands some sort of compromise between the two of them. Our characters are our best-kept promises—and we do not let them off the hook.
​
So I’m okay with the reviews that don’t get it. I’m okay with the people who don’t see their word as important, who see money or convenience as their due in a harsh world. Because sometimes, I’m just like them.
But in fiction, I want a world where our promises are important, and a world made of words is built to last.
If my characters have kept their promises, then some of mine, at least, have been kept as well.
 

* Note-- I hadn't written an Amy's Lane post this month, and after I finished this one, I realized that it would serve nicely. So yes. I'm triple posting it in my blog, at my website, and at the RRW site. Please don't get mad at the repetition, kk?

Every so often, my switch flips.  

All of the energy I pour into the world suddenly flips off, and I turn inward. Talking to the kids becomes a chore. The animals and their constant desire for attention becomes an unbearable burden. I am irritable, bitchy, and I can be heard frequently growling and muttering to myself about the stupid world and the stupid people and why can't everybody just leave me the fuck alone!

It doesn't last long--and there is a cure.

When I was teaching, this stage was cyclical--predictable.

The first week after school let out, mom would just disappear in the house, and that was that. The end. Get your own damned sandwich, right?

Now that my life is not so dependent on public education's circadian rhythms, this period of snarling, feral self-protective aggression has become less predictable.  Sometimes, it happens when I've been away for too long, on too many trips, and sometimes it happens after a vicious string of deadlines-- ones that I usually miss. Sometimes it's when family obligations have crested in a violent surf over my head. 

I've recently dealt with all three, constant and unrelenting, and when my switch flipped, it flipped with a vengeance.

And I picked my favorite drug.

Books.

I remember when The Goblet of Fire arrived at my doorstep, after a hideous, heinous school year. Oh, thank you, J.K. Rowling, you have saved my everlovin' life. The year I discovered Laurell K. Hamilton when just the thought of going back to teach made me cry--shotgunning nine books in a row (some would argue the best nine)--and cooking for the kids with a book in my hand got my ass back into the game.  There were the early years, when my son wouldn't stop crying, my daughter was on the way, and my mother-in-law's regency romances were everything the world had to offer--and more. Or when I was longing, longing for a third child, and suddenly I plunged into heady, beautiful moment, when I realized J.D. Robb had over twenty (now nearly forty) books under her belt, and I could be Eve Dallas for fuckin' ever.

Oh, blessed Goddess, to not have to be myself for a few hours. To be Harry Potter or Anita Blake or Sookie Stackhouse or Mercy Thompson or Temperance Brennan. To trade in my obligations for theirs, trade in my own demons for those of someone far more capable of handling their own. 


To disappear from all of the things pressing on my chest until I can't breathe. 


Of course, like all addictions, there is a price to pay. Puzzled children, needing my full attention, a house that tends to collect crap in the corners that is suddenly overflowing, a spouse who is surprised by the emotional needs of the children and who sort of wanders lost without me when I am not wholly present. 

But when I crawl out of the cave made by other's words and my imagination, I am always so much more game, so much more able to deal with these things than when I crawled in.

My favorite flavor of drug has changed multiple times over the years--and I'm afraid I'm not very faithful to any one brand. I step off frequently, often as soon as my shotgun run has passed, and I usually regret not being able to continue my indulgence.  It's for this reason that I never indulge in books written by people I actually know, a list that is getting smaller by the year, I might add.  It is vitally important that I not be answerable to anyone for simply stepping off a series and walking away. I am well aware that my bailing point very rarely has anything to do with the author's skill or with the series itself--this really is a case of "It's NOT YOU, it's DEFINITELY me!"but that's a freedom you don't have when you talk to the writer on a regular basis. There are often hurt feelings involved, ("You didn't like that one? I loved that one. That was MY FAVORITE BOOK IN THE WHOLE SERIES!" Why no, I've never felt like that, why would you think so?) and since I genuinely love all of my writer friends, I'd just as soon not do that to them. It is, in fact, much easier to do this with perfect strangers, so there. 

It also can't be canonical fiction. Because there's an obligation there, right? "I am reading IMPORTANT FICTION. I must ENGAGE BOTH LIZARD AND ANGEL BRAINS. I must not, by any means, ENJOY THIS EXPERIENCE."  (Or no, Amy, you're the only one who does that. Dork.) So, to me there is an obligation when reading canonical fiction that makes it less… 

Less of a drug. Less brain sugar, more brain protein. And I won't lie--I need the damned sugar. I need it. I need to mainline it, straight into the cerebral cortex, no waiting, no hem-hawing about the delicate beauties of language or the overpowering benefit of this piece of writing to the collective unconscious of mankind.

I just need my fucking cookie. I need a box of them. A case. My cookie lets me escape myself long enough to heal. My cookie bandages my psychic booboos and gives me a shot of mental morphine and helps propel my battered ragged ass back into the fray of human existence.  

There's a period of withdrawal, of course. A period of sleeping. A long, exhaustive, heartbroken moment of realization: I am NOT Eve Dallas/Harry Potter/Temperance Brennan/Jack Reacher/Anita Blake/Mercy Thompson/Sookie Stackhouse/Number Ten Ox/Betsy Davis/Whoever the flavor of the month is. It's a sad time--I deal with it gracelessly, disillusioned with the world without my word-colored glasses.  

But I get over it. And I re-enter my world refreshed, with a new perspective (and usually some new facts, collected like a sixth grader collects trivia learned from How It's Made) and the serene knowledge that me--mere me--can deal with whatever lies outside my fevered brain.

Even if it's picking up kids from school and dealing with the garbage and the laundry and several new deadlines and holy Goddess is it fucking soccer season again?

After being someone else for a period of time, I can be me again, and with the empathy engendered by a full-powered charging, my misanthropy passes, like the storm of stressed neurons it was, and new stories can grow. 

A Writer’s Garden of Dreams

 

By Amy Lane

 

Do you remember it?

Do you remember when you made that realization?

When you walked into your first book store, first grocery store, first library, looked at all the books and thought, “I want to read them all?”

Do you remember how each book felt like a treasure, a possibility, like if you could linger over each and every one of them, you could put together the puzzle of the world?

Did you learn history not from the dusty, biased tomes of your high school, but from The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Pride and Prejudice and A Tale of Two Cities or Les Miserable or The Octopus.  Better yet, did you fall into the flower-strewn abyss of historical romances, the kind you could mail order and have delivered, four every other month, and if you accept the offer right now you could even get a free wine glass with every delivery!  (I still have those wine glasses by the way—some of the classiest things in my house.)

Did you learn your code of conduct from the heroes and heroines in the storybooks? Did you look to them for guidance? Did you learn to forgive like the princesses and learn to forge on like the princes? Were your principles of honor and fair play established by the underprivileged orphans who wished to establish a world more just than the one they survived in the course of the tale?

Did your friends lose you in the mall and find you in a bookstore every time. Did you read the bio’s of the authors and try to compare their life stories to your own, try to decide if, yes, you too could be brilliant enough, imagine enough, lucky enough, to have your words preserved forever in magic strips of pulped wood?  Did you wander off when washing the dishes, daydreaming, plotting, creating a world in which you were the hero, and then, as you got older, in which your hero or heroine less and less resembled yourself, and more and more resembled some other person, someone with a different life, someone with a different experience, much like your children would grow to be completely different people than yourself?

Did you sit down to write those characters with no other drive than to see what they would do?

When you were published, did you update your entire family over your publishing process? Rejoice in every edit? Tell your family that you were busy with important things because you were publishing a book?  Did you show completele strangers your artwork? 

When they arrived in a modest brown packet at your door, did you fondle your paperbacks? Take pictures that you sent to all your friends?  Order extra, so you could see your book in a library?

When it was released in e-form, did you spend hours looking your book up on amazon.com, not to see the reviews or the rankings, but just to see that yes! You too had a book! You too could stand with your heroes, be sold in a bookstore, be counted as the millions of others with an ISBN?

Did you find out about GoodReads and look, just look, see? Somebody read my book! Somebody ranked my book! Oh, four stars? Not five? Oh wait, three? Oh no… oh, no no no no no no no no no no…one? One star?

Oh. Oh hell. Well, I must not be a writer then, because, see? One star. One star—my book isn’t really a book if it wasn’t loved. If it wasn’t cherished. If the person reading it didn’t connect immediately with the wonder that I found in the pages. My ideas, they must be no good. My world, it must be defunct. They didn’t like my heroes, they didn’t like my words, they didn’t like me!

And there’s more… there’s some fives, but I can’t trust them, and some fours, and I can’t trust them, and some threes… that’s all my story is, right? A three. So. I’m a three. I’m not in that garden of wonder. I’m not a part of those hallowed names I studied. I’m a three. That’s… well. I’m a pretender. My books don’t matter, because, you know, three. 

You forget—oh, how quickly you forget—that you didn’t grow up rating books like that, did you? No book was a one or a four or a three. All books were to be read, and some were to be reread and some were to be forgotten. Some books were daisies and some books were roses and some books were peonies, but you loved them, maybe the roses more, but you didn’t hate the daisies, and who could hate a peony?  Even the nettles stung, oh yes they did, but you learned. You never forgot a book that was a nettle, did you?  But you didn’t think that a book was a two or a five or a backhanded three and a half, did you? No.

But still, it hurts when the yearning starts. You think:

 I have another character, another world, another hero or heroine and another adventure. I have these things burning in my brain! They need to be written, I need to start the process, I need to sit and make words out of them and render the words into my world! It’s necessary.

I need other people to read it.

Are my words good? Are they good? Are they good? Am I a five? A four? A three? Oh no. Am I a one?  People won’t see me if I’m a one. (But how many ones did you read? Did you read the threes? Did you think other people’s ones were your fives? Or did you just see daisies and roses and peonies?) Please tell my book is pretty! My words are fine! I deserve to sit there in that garden with the others!

Oh, please! Can I not grow in that garden of books I fell in love with? Can I not be a flower in the garden? Don’t tell me my book is a weed!

 

Sh… peace. Peace my fellow writers. Go into that bookstore, into that grocery store, into that library, and look around. Is it the same garden you fell in love with? No. Some books have flowered for years, and some have come and gone. Some books have gone to seed, and other books, modern versions, have taken their places. Some books were forbidden, fruit too sweet, and now they grow in abundance. Some authors are revered who were once rejected, and some are forgotten who once wore laurels and supped at the table of giants.

The garden changes, every year. The prettiest book is not always the prettiest book, and sometimes, just like in high school, the prettiest book to you is the smallest, most forgotten book in the garden.

You have done your best. You have planted your seeds and built, cell by cell, the most beautiful flower you could. You have showcased it in the best flowerbed, and if it was not the loudest, or the brightest, or the most fragrant, it was still yours.

Your book was part of the garden. It has been appreciated, plucked, and has sat at a table, in a reader’s hands, for a brief time in full bloom.

You are a part of the garden. No one or two or three can make your book less a part of the garden. You built a world.  You created people.

Walk into that garden with a smile of wonder. Look at all the ideas! Look at all the possibilities! You are a part of that!  But don’t let your part of that become all of the garden.

Remember when you walked into a bookstore, or a grocery store, or a library, and the world opened at your feet?

Do that again. Don’t look for your flower and be sad if you don’t see it. Look at all the flowers, and remember those days when they were all yours for the taking. Yes, time and responsibility and deadlines have narrowed your flowerbed quite a bit—but the possibilities are still there. You are not limited by how others see your book.

Your book is an exquisite bloom in a garden riot with them.  It’s a rose or a daisy or a peony—or even a nettle. And yes—oh yes.

It belongs in that garden.  

A Jellyfish on Peanut Butter

By Amy Lane


Quick!  Think of something scintillating, interesting, hooky, and brilliant!

Give it the right words, the right inspiration, the right timing, the right zeitgeist, the right mood, the right flavor, the right shade.  Make it something not too controversial or exactly controversial enough or so controversial it sets the skies ablaze with the backlash. It should be a dash of humor, a think-piece, a passionate defense, a violent attack, an informal instruction, a reasoned plea. 

It needs to be 500 words, at least 750, less than a thousand, only 300, “as long as you want.”  It can be about your bird, your dog, your cat, your fleas, your kids, anything but your bird/dog/cat/fleas/kids and it needs to appeal to male, female, transgender, all orientations, writers only, readers only, industry insiders, newbies with hope, seasoned professionals, those in your genre, those in other genres, those in all genre and above all, it must be able to break through to the whole rest of the world.

And you need to finish in an hour, because you’re ass-deep in writing fiction and that is, after all, what you get paid for.

Everybody reading this knows what I’m talking about--

I’m talking about blogging.

I recently did a panel at the Dreamspinner Press conference, and I felt pretty confident with almost every question—except this one.

“How do you know what to blog about? How do you think of blogging topics every day, or three days a week, or five days a week, or whenever you’re asked to blog?”

In a way, it was hilarious, because I literally can’t shut up in the blogosphere. When I was told I needed to write short blogs daily instead of long blogs three times a week, it was the easiest transition in the world. Blog tours? Guest blogging? Writing articles for RRW?  Yeah—I do that all the time. (Okay, not always on time, and my deadlines for the RRW are becoming more of a guideline than a rule, really, but I do actually write something once a month.)  But deadlines or not, the fact is, I can usually pull something out of my, erm, ear when asked to perform on cue.

I just never really thought about how I did that before.

And I’ll be honest: once I was asked that, I was rather afraid I’d be like Garfield the cat in the comic. I was afraid I’d never blog again.

But now that I’m not on a panel (and hello, paneling is a whole other skill set that I need to talk about soon) I’ve been making note of a few things that I actually do in order to be online to blog.

A.   I know how to write an essay.  I know most of us know how to write an essay, but I taught essay writing to freshmen who could barely write a sentence. I had to break it down to its most basic components, including a thesis statement, concrete detail, commentary, and conclusion. Knowing the bare bolts of an essay makes it possible to write a coherent blog post on any topic, and this is especially important when guest blogging. When you’re blogging for yourself, you’re allowed to natter ad infinitum, but when you blog for someone else, what you’re really doing is writing an essay. Which leads me to…

B.    I know who my audience is.  (Usually.)  If I’m writing Amy’s Lane, I’m usually writing for someone who’s interested in craft. If I’m doing a guest blog post, it’s usually for someone who wants a connection to my latest book. If I’m writing a personal blog, it’s for someone who wants to be entertained.  Now, my personal blog is sometimes potpourri—but I find I have the best results if I keep my craft essays in one place and my fiction explanations in another. Knowing your audience is knowing what to talk about—and that helps as well. (As proof? I sat down to write an guest blog essay, and this article popped out—so I wrote another topic for the guest blog and kept this one for Amy’s Lane.)

C.    I have more than one interest.  Yes, writing, craft, industry, other books—all of this is fascinating to me. But I also pay attention to everything from movies to knitting to child-raising to science shows (because I’m captive) to politics (which I keep to a minimum.)  I get memes on everything from turtle sex to two-headed frogs to squirrels falling off clotheslines, and I enjoy it all. Having all of those things running through my brain gives me some great stuff to blog about, and it attracts me to other things that give me great topics to blog about, and so on and so on. The train of inspiration never stops if you allow yourself to be inspired by everything.

D.   I bring my A-game to my blogging. Literary devices? Appropriate word choice? Dancing delicately around sensitive moments?  I bring this to my blogging as well. My proofreading skills aren’t fabulous—I try to compensate by making the content meaningful, relevant, and well-crafted.  Also, those carefully woven word tapestries give you content where you never expected content could be found.

E.     I recruit proofreaders when I can. Obviously not always, but yes—I do beg, borrow, and cajole fellow writers to tell me when I’ve showcased a massive boner for the readers’ viewing pleasure.  Very often those proofreaders say, “Hey, why don’t you talk about this!”  And voila! Not only do I have cleaner copy, I have another blog idea!

F.    I listen to music. Music, poetry, art, literature—all of it inspires us. It goes along with having more than one interest, but music is the thing that can thread through our consciousness and give us that niggling thought which will turn into the most brilliant blog topic of all time. Or, you know, it will just be waiting in your, erm, ear, when you go to pull something out of it.

Okay—so, as usually happens, as soon as I close this essay out, I’m going to remember a thousand and one other points—but that’s not the point!

The point is, blogging and writing articles is part of our jobs as fiction writers—and very often it’s pro bono work, something we do as part of our publicity package, or part of our involvement in our writing community. The most important part of coming up with a blog topic is to make it something that interests you. If you are interested, you can engage your reader and reward your host (because host generosity is important to acknowledge.)  Interested people are interesting—it’s that simple.

When I was teaching, we often joked about how you could write an essay about anything—we could write an essay about spit. All we needed was a thesis, concrete details, and commentary. So:

Thesis: Spit is gross

Concrete Detail 1: Spit is slimy and unappealing

Concrete Detail 2:Spit of bacteria and digestive enzymes decomposing what you just ate.

Concrete Detail 3: Spit comes from your mouth so it was inside of you.

Concrete Detail 4: Sometimes spit mixes with phlegm, which is essentially sinus pus, which is doubly disgusting.

Conclusion: Spit is not only gross, it should remain firmly entrenched in the human mouth.

There you go—an add some commentary and you have an essay or blog post on spit, all ready to go. Do adults necessarily want to read it? Well, that’s why you need to assess your audience right there—but it does prove my point. Essay topics are out there in the aether for the taking.  Be aware of your environment, your audience, your interests, and something will present itself to be pulled from your “ear” at the asking. 

The Marketing Waltz

 

By Amy Lane

 

To Damon and Poppy, who have rendered the art of the come-to-Jesus-meeting down to a beautiful science.

 

So The Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, waxes lyrical about what she calls the “finger dance”—the myriad tiny movements that our fingers make as we’re doing something as automatic as knitting.  We’ve created a million stitches on a thousand projects—and each stitch is a miracle of small specific functions that we’ve repeated so often we’re not aware of it.

And yet, any knitter will tell you that there is always room for improvement. There is refinement of technique, a different way to cast on, a different way to move fingers in order to facilitate speed.  On the one hand, why mess with a good thing, right? Knitting is occurring, a product is being produced, and the world turns apace.

On the other hand, moar knitting could occur, a better product could be produced, and the world could turn apace made just a teeny bit more perfect because a knitter tried something new.

It’s something to think about.

Recently (as in “am still doing laundry from”) I attended my publisher’s annual conference—this year, in Orlando.  Now this year could have felt like old hat.  It was the fourth conference, I knew most of the people, and in a general sort of way it felt more as though I were attending a family reunion than a work conference, and that was fun too!

But the emphasis this year was on marketing, and, well…

I mean, you may say I have my marketing all together—I’ve got a logo, a website, a twitter, a blog, a FB—what else does a girl have to do?

Well, apparently get my shit together—and I was told that with love, by two people I really love and admire back.

Now when I was younger, (read: forty) I would have reacted to this sort of career intervention with my characteristic grace. I would have sobbed into my pillow that the whole world was full of stupid-heads who didn’t understand me and I was doing just fine dammit, and didn’t they see I didn’t want to do any better?

And I would have been locked into my original finger dance forever, never changing, never trying, failing or possibly improving.

But writing is a different bag than teaching. For one thing, being called a “fat fucking bitch” is not an expected part of my week, and not something that should be happening if I do my job well.  For another, part of being a writer is engaging my sensitivity to the world around me—thinking in symbols, recognizing the impact of the semiotic message on the people I wish to impress.  Part of that is letting people know what they’re getting when they open one of my books—even if it’s that they don’t want to open one of my books.

So the advice was well given—and even better, I hope it was well taken, and on the way home, I read about the finger dance.

And I thought about that metaphor. How very often we get locked into the tiny, minute movements that create our day, our work, our product, our lives.

Fixing my marketing plan is going to take many changes to the small things I do on a daily basis, and on my larger approach to my work.  It’s going to take breaking out of the trap laid for me by habit, by one-time necessity, by obliviousness, and creating new habits that will serve me better.

Why would I want to do that?

Well, if I’m knitting, I’m creating a more seamless product, and giving myself the tools to create something more complex and lovely than what I’m working on now. Being able to control a strand of yarn on each forefinger helps me to make a Fair Isle garment that’s regular and professional looking. Making cables without a cable hook allows me to knit cable projects at will and not to have to worry about bringing a cable needle in my project bag. Learning socks on a long circular needle helps make socks portable, without losing my sock every time I pick up my bag.

If I’m writing?

It helps me sell more books to people who want to read what I have to write.

Wow.

It’s even simpler than knitting.

Well, maybe not simple to do--but worth it, I hope, in the long run.

So, a simple but profound lesson in the finger dance, right?  Even simple and effective may always be improved upon.  And more than that.

Even though writing (like knitting) is a solitary profession, that doesn’t mean that we’re actually in it alone. We tend to write in a community—and if you’re lucky enough to have a supportive community, then by all means allow them to teach you things.  When I was younger, and would have resisted advice like this with all of my soul, that’s possibly because I was used to advice being a passive aggressive sort of punishment and threat: Change what you do or you are incompetent and we don’t like you anyway so you’re screwed.  Or: Change what you do because you make us uncomfortable with your outlandish ways and your bleeding heart and we need that to change. 

This lesson was different. This was, “We want what’s best for you, so here are ways you can succeed.”

Seriously—I’ve been out of teaching for nearly five years, and that sort of genuine desire to help still brings me to tears.  I’m old enough—and hopefully wise enough—to allow those lessons to change me, because optimism and good faith should change us for the better.  It should help render what was once merely functional into something elegant and transformative.

The Yarn Harlot turned knitting into “the finger dance”—and it obviously made an impression.  My friends spoke to me about “the marketing waltz” and now it’s up to me to take their words and make my own impression.

Either way, I get to create with color—it is all good.

One Headlight

 

By Amy Lane

 

 

Don’t we all dream about it?

We write that one book.  THE book. The book that flows off the shelves—brick and mortar shelves--and is read by everyone, rich and poor, young and old. The breakout hit, the book that gets us fame, fortune, interviews with John Stewart, movie options, and, finally, a trip down the red carpet for the writer’s credit on the screenplay of the century.

That dream.

We dream about being the next big thing, the writer who smashes all boundaries, the poster child on all blogs and magazines.  Is that too much to ask?

Well, yes and no.

I mean, dreams are nice.  And that dream of recognition and financial security for doing the thing we really love—should that be so far off? Lots of other fields have that dream, right? 

But do consider what that dream really means.

Let’s say you write a breakout genre hit—and I could name a few, because yes, I do look longingly at other people’s amazon.com numbers and think “Oooooooh… that would be splendid!  I should write a book like that!”

Excellent. The book rises on the charts, the book falls, and then…

What are you writing next? Do you love it? Does it fill your soul? Does it make you happy?  Or are you just trying to write the next chart topper?  Because yes, some people do write hit upon hit upon hit but most of us?

90% of us?

Just keep writing.

And we never know if it’s going to be a bona fide hit, or if it’s going to be a flop, or if it’s going to be somewhere in between.  

Now, there are some ways we could improve our chances—some basic things we know about sales.  Happy sells better than sad, action and drama sell better than tragedy, young sells better than old, contemporary sells better than fantasy/sci-fi, sex sells better than lights fade to black, shapeshifters break all the rules including metaphysical ones, and m/f romance continues to outsell m/m romance on most (but not all!) fronts.

BOOM!

There we go—follow those rules and you’ve got a 75% chance of writing something that might not tank.

But sometimes we do follow those rules, and we don’t tear down the house, and we’re left… wait, what?

Writing our next book, hoping that it sells well and that people like it.

So, just like the people who have topped the charts, we are doing the exact same thing.

We just keep writing.

I’ve had some books that have sold extraordinarily well.  I’ve had some books that have barely kissed the amazon.com top twenty in genre and then plummeted back down. I’ve had some books that have barely even skated the tail end of the charts.

My ability to predict which books were which? 

Ab. Solute. Zero. 

I got nothing.  I mean, I wrote last month about how I knew when I was taking a left turn now, but I’d had to actually write another left turn to know I was doing it.  And some people who are really great at predicting what sells are probably laughing their asses off, because, well, I just wrote down the probabilities. I’ve been in the business long enough. Shouldn’t I know?

Hang on—I’m about to make another left turn.

One of the tragic things about the United States political system (in my humble opinion) is that nobody in America has passed science and it’s starting to show.  One of the things that science teaches us is that first you formulate a theory, then you test that theory, then you use the results of that test to refine your theory, then you repeat the process until you have something that doesn’t make your test subject grow three heads and explode!

In short: Try. Fail. Try again. Fail some more. Try until it works.

It’s tragic that my country hasn’t adopted this approach—has, in fact, failed science and then failed political science as a result.  Not believing in science has locked our government—a group of people in charge of a GIANT SLOW CHANGING VESSEL into the idea that if they try something for a month and it doesn’t work, that’s considered a failure and the guy is voted out of office immediately.  Because it takes so long to see if anything will work, the general mindset of the government is to get reelected. In an effort to get reelected, none of our politicians try anything new because they’re afraid it will fail.

 

Trying to play the writer’s market is like that.

If all we do is write the same thing again and again and again, we are, in fact, playing to the idea that if we try anything new, it will fail.

What if we try something new and it succeeds?  What if we try something new, and we think it fails, but as time goes on it proves that it was just playing for a select audience? What if we try something new and non-commercial and it fails, but then we refine that idea and it takes off?

What if we try something new and it’s a critical success and a commercial failure and we’re still proud of it?

What if we never try something new and we fail to evolve, and when we’re at the end of our career our legacy is the first or second book we’ve ever written, and all our other work is merely a knock off of our first original idea?

I do remember a few years ago when I was TNBT (The Next Big Thing—not Teenage Ninja Butt Tiger, that’s a whole other comic.)  I was shocked a little when people started telling me I was a big deal.

And then, as always, I started to worry. Oh God—I’ve written something everybody loves.  What if I never write something that good again? What if the sequel sucks? What if I let everybody down?  And remember—my first book out there was If I Must--happy happy kitty on the front, sweet and sexy roommates in love story inside.  And after that? Keeping Promise Rock. Oh God, oh Goddess, what if everybody who reads If I Must reads Promise Rock and hates me because they think I let them down, they were expecting cute kittens and then they got tragedy ridden ranchers and then, oh holy crap, I’m coming out with Truth in the Dark and nobody will like that, because it’s Beauty who’s not beautiful, and now it’s Litha’s Constant Whim and it’s something entirely different, and Making Promises, and people are going to hate me because Shane’s not Deacon and…

And if I’d been doing that for that last five years, I’d be dead.

And if I’d tried repeatedly to recreate If I Must or Keeping Promise Rock I’d also be dead—or at least creatively dead. But… but… but I want this next book to be in the top spot, or the next one, or the next one, oh, hey, this one made it, how do I make that happen again?  But I don’t want to write that book again, what about the next one or the next one or…

Well, yeah—there is a reason writers drink, singers do drugs, and actors retire at thirty.

But not all of them.

Most of them—90% of them—just keep swimming.

They take the jobs they can, they do their best, they hope for another. Some of their endeavors are successful, some of them are not, they move on to the next thing. 

When I was teaching, I used to fear and loathe the almighty fucking evaluation—I have a host of bad ones in my memory chamber that would give anybody with performance anxiety hemorrhoids. There was the time I sat in the principal’s office waiting for the principal to come in and talk to me, and overheard the secretary and the receptionist talking about how I wasn’t going to get hired back anyway because the district office was pissed that I’d gone into the interview pregnant and now, at nine months along, I was taking a whole six weeks maternity leave.  There was the time I was told, “Yeah, you’re a good teacher but you’ve taken too much time off for your new baby with mysterious problems, and I’d look for another job.”  There was the time the principal came in with his laptop open and told me he was taking “attention matrix readings” during my first period class so he could prove nobody was paying attention. (I am not making this shit up. God, what a douchecanoe.)  But far and away the worst review I ever received was the one where the principal—after fourteen missed appointments wherein my anxiety built in spades--walked in on me while I was giving the same lesson that had failed when I’d been evaluated the year before.

 

Yes, you read that right.

I was trying something new, something not in the books, and during my first evaluation at that school, the lesson flopped. Badly. Kids screaming around the room badly. Sweat dripping into my eyes badly. I hyperventilated during the wind-down, when I was supposed to be telling them what they had learned because they hadn’t learned a fucking thing--that badly.

And I re-tooled that lesson for the next year, because dammit, it had the seeds of something great in it, and I wanted to see it through. 

So it was, the next year during evaluation season, after fourteen missed appointments, my principal walked in and I don’t remember how it went, to tell you the truth. All I remember is that I ended up sobbing in a corner for the next three periods while half my students tried to comfort me and half of them tried to burn the room down.  I cannot begin to tell you the anxiety of having yet another authority figure watch me fuck up the same idea.  (Granted, some of the fucking up was that sense of doom I got when he walked in to watch me try this particular lesson plan one more time.)

The next year, I did that lesson One. More. Time.

For three freshman classes.

And it worked.

It worked for the next ten years, freshman through seniors, it worked.

At the end of my career, the school’s demographic had changed radically, as had the teaching standards in the earlier grades.  The last time I tried that lesson—the one that had done so splendidly for ten years—it flopped, completely, but I didn’t cry this time.

This time, I’d had enough experience, knew enough of what worked and what didn’t and what kids should know and what they often didn’t have when they walked into my room, to know that it wasn’t me. It was them. And I had to find the thing that worked for them.

That is the secret to writing the chart-topping genre blockbuster.

You try, you fail, you try again, you go with what works, you try something else, and when what works starts to fail, you take the something else and work with it some more.

And when all else fails?

You look at Bruce Springsteen’s career.

After Born to Run (or was it before? I always forget) he appeared on two nationally known magazines in the same week.  Then he dropped off the public radar for a couple of years, fought a law suit, put out a couple of albums that fans treasure, and resurfaced in the throes of wild stardom with Born in the USA.  When that faded, he kept putting out albums, got married, got divorced, found his soul mate, kept putting out music, stole the limelight back in 1998 or so when he sang “One Headlight” with Bob Dylan’s son in live concert and blew everyone away, and then totally wiped the floor with us when he put out The Rising in 2002.  And then he went low-key for a little while, put out Magic, and Wrecking Ball, and Devils and Dust (not necessarily in that order) and at one point in there blew our minds on stage during the Super Bowl during a live concert by doing a back flip on stage—when he was in his fifties.

It was not one hit that made his career. Or two. Or a hit album. Or several. It was his entire body of work, and all the things he did in between. 

Yeah, sure. We all dream about it. We dream about writing that chart topping, crossover hit with a million copies and twenty printings, the one on everybody’s lips in the bookstore, the one that makes the talk show circuits, the IT BOOK for our age.

And some of us write it.

And some of us just keep on writing.

The Devil in the Details

 

By

 

Amy Lane

 

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

 


On the one hand, I love details. 

I love the color of a hero’s eyes, the scent of their skin. I love the music he listens to, the sports he watches, and whether he uses a certain shampoo or shaves his pubes or had a crush on his third grade teacher.

Details, glorious details—they make my people human in my own feeble brain.

On the other hand, I loathe details.

Did I say feeble?  I seriously have the brain capacity of three-year-old head-cheese.  Would we like examples?  I think we’d like examples:

My sense of time has never been awesome:

I can lose myself in any task for between thirty seconds to four hours, and the only reason I know there’s a difference is because after four hours I have to pee like a racehorse.

 I don’t recognize faces: 

My husband has a bunch of clean-cut, generally Caucasian friends, and it took me years to learn which name matched which face.  I still have problems remembering which man goes with which wife.  (The wives I remember—hair length and color are lifesavers.)

I don’t recognize area landmarks:

 One of the reasons I write so consistently about my hometown is that remembering visual place details is horrible for me unless I have some historical and socio-economic background to go with the place.  All of those lovely detail receptors that make most adults function socially during travel in a non-freakish way are completely alien to me.

So research is a nightmare.

I can look up all the facts—have, in fact, spent hours looking up things like locations, travel time, the college basketball system, school rivalries, what it takes to get into a CSU—and I’ll always miss that last detail that someone will claim is the difference between a good book and a shitacular book.  Hell—I graduated from the CSU system—in fact, helped students get in to college in California—oh, hell, I’ve got two kids in college in California myself, and I still can’t pin down the goddamned cut-off dates for applying for the new semester.  (The fact that I like to write college-aged protagonists makes this particularly bitter.) 

“So what?” you’re saying.  “You can’t know everything!”

Well, yeah.  Because I’m one person, right?  But there are a lot more readers than there are Amy Lanes, and if I get something wrong, somebody is bound to notice.

Want examples?

·                     I spent hours looking up airtime from one European city to the next, and I still didn’t manage to convey a sense of time for the dogfight in The Bells of Times Square. I know this because a reader called me on it.

·                     God forbid I have a kid applying to college, because there’s always a reader who wants to tell me I missed the cut-off date.

·                     I was in junior high choir as well as high school and college band, have listened to music all my life and taught myself to play musical melodies on the flute by reading guitar sheet music, and someone just called me on a musical detail from Beneath the Stain.  

 

·                     I watched videos of North Carolina basketball players during their freshmen year, and had The Locker Room proofread by someone who attended that college with her husband and who never misses a Tar Heels game on the radio or television, and yes, there is a review out there that claims I did no research whatsoever.

·                    And don’t get me started on the people in porn who read a Johnnies book and say, “They don’t schedule scenes like this!”

·                     Or the people who read a description from a city I know really well and say, “You, uhm, know that street is all strip mall now, right?

·                     And I’ll never live down the time I sent a guy on a motorcycle with no shirt, helmet, nor shoes, on a motorcycle ride that would take an hour and a half to complete.  (It’s a good thing he wasn’t human to begin with.)

And I’m sort of at a loss for what to tell these people.  I mean, good faith effort?  I has it!  But I also have the sort of mind that will let me drive through an intersection everyday, stop, look left, look right, and go through it, without acknowledging that there’s been a stoplight there for over a month.  (True story, multiple times, multiple intersections, no traffic accidents thank God!)

I have the sort of mind that almost got me fired from teaching or written up on multiple occasions for not following standard procedure—because I didn’t remember standard operating procedure, no matter how many times the ever-patient secretaries gave me a list.  I mean, the only reason I ever sponsored clubs was that the students patted me on the cheek and said, “Don’t worry, Ms. Lane. We’ll fill out the paperwork for you.”  Hell, my publishers finally stopped trying to get me to send things up the food chain and finally just said, “Send your questions to us, Amy. We’ll take care of you!” because every time something changed it took me two months to realize I was even being rerouted and in the meantime I created unbelievable havoc by talking to multiple people about the same issue.

Sigh

Just writing the list of my shortcomings is depressing.

What was I doing again?

Oh yes—explaining why those details are only ten percent of fiction.

They are.  Those day-to-day details that get us sent to the DMV for weeks at a time or put off our school application for a semester or lead to the dog taking multiple dumps in your dirty clothes in one night aren’t the reason we pick up a romance book. (Especially that last one.) 

Sure—the details might help make the romance more plausible, and even more enjoyable (except, of course, that last one) but we don’t pick up a romance book for gritty reality.  We don’t even pick up a regular fiction book for gritty reality.

One of the first textbooks I ever taught from—Freshman English, mind you—had a section on “details”.  I can’t quote from it exactly (see all the reasons listed above regarding terrible memory and space/time continuum) but I do remember the gist.  It was talking about a cowboy showdown on the surface of a distant planet. 

The textbook said (and I definitely paraphrase):


Do we want to say ‘There was one rock two-point-six feet from another rock, and another rock with a mass of seven cubic yards sitting four-point-two feet from the third rock. The dirt was a composite of clay, ochre, and many extraneous minerals, the humidity was negative six, and the ranged from 600 to 800 degrees Fahrenheit on any given day.’?  Or would our purpose be better served with ‘The terrain was rocky and covered with red dust, and it was hot enough to cook a person dead without a space suit or temperature controls.’?  Details are necessary to help a reader feel as though they were there, but too many details can obscure the purpose of adding them at all.

Yeah—that right there was a revelation to me, because it’s true.  At least for the type of reader I am, with my squirrel brain. If I have enough details to set a scene and to give my characters motivation to do what they’re doing as a reader then damn am I done with worrying about details. What are my people doing instead?

Now I know for some people this sounds like heresy.  Isn’t fiction supposed to pride itself on mimicking reality?

Well, no.

In reality, if I were to detail everything I see, hear, smell, think, and feel, just sitting at my kitchen table typing, I would have spent six hours on one moment—and not gotten to the point.  What fiction does usually is put reality in sort of an order. I don’t need to list every exact thing for you to know there are bills, children’s toys, office equipment, and cooking supplies left over from when Mate was trying to make Christmas fudge. 

What matters here is that the children’s toys actually belong to me, the bills aren’t in any sort of order, the office equipment is functional, and Christmas was two weeks ago.  What does this say?

A.   That I’m mentally six.

B.    That we pay our bills electronically.

C.    Cleaning up is foreign to us.

D.   The kitchen table hasn’t been used for meals in over five years.

So what matters here is not so much the list of details, but what the details mean to the person, and that’s the rope I cling to when I’m trying to get details right for a story.  What matters isn’t when Adam in Candy Man is applying to college and that the deadline is feasible (for transfer students it actually was—I checked with my daughter who was trying to transfer this December so she could start school in the fall) it is that Adam is still trying to get into school and hasn’t lost faith.  What matters isn’t that Nate’s dogfight took hours (but was still feasible in one night—again, I did the math several times)  it was that Nate’s plane went down because Nate was trying to do his job, and that Nate was facing prejudice even as his life was in danger.  What matters isn’t what Mackey was yelling at Blake for, what matters is that Mackey would have yelled at Blake if he’d been pitch perfect and brilliant, because Blake wasn’t who Mackey wanted. 

What matters isn’t that the details were perfect, what matters is that the humans were flawed. 

Or, at least to me, that’s what mattered.

Now, I’m aware I could take some criticism for this—people will accuse me of being intentionally sloppy or dismissive of what’s important, or whatever, and once again, we’re missing the point.

I research. I’m not great at it, but brother, I do it.  I look up details, I put them in context, I have twenty tabs open in my browser so I can go back and refer to things—my heart is there even if my skills are not.  I will never not try to get it perfect.

I’m just saying that at some point, I have to acknowledge that I will never not fail, either.

And I have to remember that failing at the details shouldn’t stop me from writing.  Those details aren’t the reason I write, and they’re not the story I want to tell. The details are the means to an end.  The end is the emotional impact, the study of human virtue and vice, the inherent hope of writing a story in which two human beings connect and something joyful happens. 

It’s like this—Eleanor of Aquitane may have died 811 years ago (looked that up, did the math wrong, wrote 611, proofread and fixed it) but that’s not the point.  The point is, she brought stories of Arthur and Gwenevere and Launcelot from France to England, and a long history of believing that love was at least as important as king and country, began.